United Football League

[Your Name Here]

I've submitted these names for ideas:

- Orlando Barracudas

- New York Gothams

- Las Vegas Jokers

- San Francisco Sea Lions

I see a trend here....

Next year, will we have the Hartford Batmen? the Los Angeles Robins?

-Portland Penguins

-Raleigh Riddlers

Boston Bookworms

Edmonton Eggheads

[Mac the Knife]

That's the problem with playing in the fall.

They have 25 games in total-I can watch that many in 2-3 weeks during the fall already without Versus. How can you make a dent in the face of that?

The short answer - and believe it or not the logical one is - you don't. That's why you make the deal with Versus or, if I were the one handling television for a new start-up league, the likes of a TBS/TNT. Your league's games are not going to draw ratings - you know it, and in all likelihood the network you're doing business with does as well. So you pitch the concept as "growing together," much the way the infant AFL helped a then-fledgling ABC. Versus is precisely the type of network that could benefit from such a partnership, whereas TBS/TNT's sports luster has been diminishing for years now and a UFL-like product would help bolster its overall image as "superstation" level networks.

You focus the league's long-term strategy not on ensuring that television ratings are there, but rather that your on-field product be continually improving. The biggest mistakes made by every new league of the past 30 years has been that they've put emphasis on televising games. While that's great for initial revenue, long-term it hurts because the entire nation sees that your product isn't very damned good in the beginning.

This is where I see the UFL perhaps doing something right - by putting games on Versus, they're making them available on-air while at the same time potentially giving the on-field product a chance to develop without XFL-like overexposure. Then perhaps down the road, if they make it that far and the level of play improves, they can then expand their television exposure and clearly demonstrate that the level of play is at least somewhat comparable to that of the NFL.

[rams80]

Unfortunately for the "growing with the network" strategy, I'm not sure that you can grow without being choked out by the Bristol Behemoth. Ultimately if your cable network is going to grow, it needs to get onto a better cable tier than what it currently has. I doubt Versus will gain enough sporting events to justify such a change. I don't believe the UFL and NHL and possibly resurrected AFL can bring enough to the table, and ESPN spectacularly outbids network television, let alone cable, for the rights to anything that could provide the boost.