New Pro Football League?

[Joemailman]

Cuban hopes to create football league
Mavs boss part of group looking to compete with NFL
Posted: Wednesday May 30, 2007 6:03PM; Updated: Wednesday May 30, 2007 6:13PM

NEW YORK (AP) -- Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is part of a group considering formation of a football league that would compete with the NFL for players drafted lower than the second round.

The league, still very much in the preliminary stage, would play its games on Friday nights. The NFL does not play then because of the potential conflict with high school football.

"It's a pretty simple concept," Cuban said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "We think there is more demand for pro football than supply."

The proposal was first disclosed by The New York Times on its Web site, which said it was the idea of Bill Hambrecht, a Wall Street investor who was a minority partner in the Oakland Invaders of the USFL, which played in the spring from 1983-85. Sharon Smith, a spokeswoman for Hambrecht and Company, had no comment and said Hambrecht was traveling and unavailable to talk about the idea.

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said he was aware of the proposed league, but had no further comment.

There have been numerous leagues that have tried to compete with the NFL and a few that actually played games, starting with the AFL, which began in 1960 and fully merged with the NFL a decade later. It included such current franchises as New England, Oakland, Kansas City, San Diego, Buffalo, the New York Jets and Denver.

More recently came the World Football League in the early 1970s, which raided the NFL for such stars as Larry Csonka. Then came the USFL, which played in the spring before folding after receiving only $3 in an antitrust "victory" over the NFL.

The USFL featured such future Hall of Famers as Jim Kelly, Reggie White and Steve Young, but lost millions of dollars trying to compete for players. It also had internal struggles among a majority of owners who wanted to stay in the spring, and the best known among them, Donald Trump, who wanted to move to the fall and try to force a merger with the NFL.

The most recent pro football league was the XFL, founded by the World Wrestling Federation and televised by NBC. The XFL lasted just three months in the spring of 2001 and was best known for a player named Rod Smart, called "He Hate Me," who later played as a return man and backup running back in the NFL.

So far, the proposed new league is in its infancy and Cuban is the only potential owner for what the founders hope will be an eight-team league.

Cuban said in his e-mail he believes the salary cap makes it easier to compete financially with the NFL because of the salary imbalance that leaves lower-level players with lower salaries. That would allow the new league to fill its rosters with players taken lower than the second round, as well as late NFL cuts and free agents who escape the NFL draft.

Many such players, including Tom Brady, a sixth-round pick of New England, have become NFL stars.

"That's not to say it will be easy. It won't," Cuban wrote. "We still have to cover quite a bit of ground and have a lot of milestones to hit. That said, if we can get the right owners I obviously think we can make this work."

Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


Cuban surely has the money to take a stab at it. I think it would be hard to get decent talent to turn their back on the NFL though. Would you rather be a backup with the Green Bay Packers or a starter with the Milwaukee Bratwursts?

[Rastak]

[size=18]I think it would be hard to get decent talent to turn their back on the NFL though. Would you rather be a backup with the Green Bay Packers or a starter with the Milwaukee Bratwursts?[/b]


Like the WFL and USFL had trouble? Money talks.

[Joemailman]

Sure they can attract talent if they offer enough money. However, that is what did in the USFL. They lost millions trying to compete with the NFL for talent.

[MJZiggy]

First off, the NFL has one thing right. They don't play on Friday nights. So not only is this new league going to be competing for talent and viewership with the NFL, it's also going to have to compete with high school football all over the country. If a good part of the fan base for football is younger viewers, then this league will fail for the preference of people to be playing or watching their own kids play...

[Rastak]

Sure they can attract talent if they offer enough money. However, that is what did in the USFL. They lost millions trying to compete with the NFL for talent.

I didn't say they'd make money or succeed. I assume they will go broke bidding for talent.

[oregonpackfan]

First off, the NFL has one thing right. They don't play on Friday nights. So not only is this new league going to be competing for talent and viewership with the NFL, it's also going to have to compete with high school football all over the country. If a good part of the fan base for football is younger viewers, then this league will fail for the preference of people to be playing or watching their own kids play...

You make a very solid point, MJZiggy,

As you know, I have daughters but no sons yet I faithfully attend my community's Friday night high school football games. Going to the high school games in my community of 16,000 is a Norman Rockwell, small town type of experience.

Sure I enjoy watching the action on the field but I enjoy seeing members of the community I often do not see. Those conversations help keep me in touch with the community.

My daughters attend every home high school game not only to support their team but to connect with their friends. Often, I think the social connection is more important for them than the action on the field.

There is no way I would sacrifice that small town high school football experience to stay home and watch a new pro football team on TV.

In the football fall season:

Friday nights are for high school football
Saturdays are for college football--Badgers(when I can see them) Ducks, and Beavers
Sundays for the Packers

[Harlan Huckleby]

First and Long — Very Long
By JOE NOCERA
Published: June 3, 2007

Bill Hambrecht is a rich old Wall Street guy who has made his money tilting at windmills and disrupting the establishment. “That’s what I do,” he says. “It’s fun.” Almost a decade ago, at 62, he founded WR Hambrecht + Company, whose fundamental premise is that companies don’t need to use Wall Street investment bankers — and pay their outrageous fees — to go public. Hambrecht + Company has since become so threatening to traditional underwriters that they often refuse to be involved in any I.P.O. in which his firm takes part.

And now, at an age when most people are well into retirement, he has decided to tackle the establishment again. This time, though, the establishment isn’t Wall Street. It’s the National Football League. Bill Hambrecht, you see, is starting up a professional football league. So far, he and his partner, Tim Armstrong, a senior executive at Google, have pledged $2 million each. They’ve hired a C.E.O. and a C.O.O., both of whom cut their teeth at the National Basketball Association. They’ve got a name: the United Football League. And they’ve lined up a wealthy, well-known businessman as their first owner: Mark Cuban, the billionaire who owns the N.B.A.’s Dallas Mavericks. Like Hambrecht, Cuban loves nothing more than confronting the status quo.

Obviously, the U.F.L. is still in the early planning stages. It hasn’t yet hired a single football person and is still hunting for seven more owners with Cuban’s deep pockets and contrarian mindset, so that the league can begin with eight teams. It could easily fall apart before the first kickoff. Indeed, there has already been one setback: Boone Pickens, the oilman turned-corporate-raider-turned-billionaire-hedge-fund manager, recently abandoned his intention to buy a team. But Cuban remains committed, and if all goes according to plan, the U.F.L. will play its first preseason games in August 2008. I kid you not.

Hambrecht has been thinking unconventional thoughts about pro football for a long time. Back in the early 1980s, he was a minority partner in the Oakland Invaders, one of the original franchises of the late, unlamented United States Football League, a spring league that played its games during the N.F.L.’s off-season. The U.S.F.L. folded in 1985, after three seasons. “It was started by a bunch of guys who were riding high because of the S.&L. boom,” Hambrecht recalls. “As soon as the boom turned to bust, the league went broke.”

Most of us would go through such an experience and conclude, Never again. Not Hambrecht. He was convinced that the U.S.F.L. could have worked with a smarter game plan and owners who were more patient. At various times he discussed a new league with NBC, CBS and Fox, but those talks went nowhere. Then one day last year, Hambrecht told Tim Armstrong, whom he met when his firm helped manage Google’s initial public offering, about his dream of a new football league. The more Armstrong heard, the more excited he got. By October, the two men had committed their $2 million, hired their first three executives (Bill Daugherty, the C.E.O.; Jon Brod, the C.O.O.; and Andrew Goldberg, a senior analyst) and begun an extensive study to see if the idea was really feasible.

Let’s now take a moment to consider what the U.F.L. will be up against: a monopolistic sports league utterly unafraid to take advantage of its monopoly power. Over the years, the N.F.L. has squashed four competitors, most recently the NBC- and World Wrestling Federation-backed XFL in 2001. Right now, Arena Football is an alternate league, but it’s a marginal thing, with negligible TV ratings and an average of 12,000 fans per game. And with eight players to a side, games in the N.F.L.’s off-season and a field that looks like a hockey rink, it’s not exactly “real” football.

Where others might be daunted by the N.F.L.’s success and power, though, Hambrecht came to believe its monopoly status gave him an opening. “I really started thinking hard about this after the Los Angeles Rams left to go to St. Louis and the Houston Oilers went to Nashville,” he told me over drinks recently. “Why do you leave two of the top 10 TV markets in the country for these two smaller markets?”

The answer, of course, is that the N.F.L. doesn’t really have to worry about where its teams are located, since most games are televised and the bulk of the league’s revenues come from its network contracts. What’s more, with the right stadium deal and enough corporate sponsorship, team owners can make as much (or more) money in smaller cities as they can in larger ones. That’s why the N.F.L. does just fine despite not fielding a team in 21 of the country’s top 50 markets — including such enormous metropolitan areas as San Antonio, Las Vegas, Orlando and (of course) Los Angeles. Nor does the N.F.L., which now has 32 teams, have much incentive to expand. On the contrary: expansion dilutes the TV money. (Greg Aiello, the N.F.L.’s spokesman, told me that “expansion isn’t on the table right now.”)

So the first step in Hambrecht’s plan is to enter big cities where the N.F.L. isn’t. As Mark Cuban put it to me in an e-mail, “There are quite a few good-sized non-N.F.L. cities that can support a pro team.” So far, the U.F.L. has decided to put teams in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Mexico City. (Cuban is considering taking the Las Vegas franchise.) Each owner will put up $30 million, giving him an initial half-interest in the team; the league will own the other half. But eventually the fans themselves will become shareholders — because each team is going to sell shares to the public. Then the owner, the league and the fans will each own a third of every franchise.

Hambrecht and his executives believe that the initial public offerings will raise, on average, another $60 million per team, giving it about $90 million in working capital. They also hope that the stock sale will create intense fan loyalty. “This is going to be a very accessible league,” says Daugherty, the C.E.O. “Fans will own a piece of the team, and they’ll get tickets at more affordable prices.”

Hambrecht expects his owners to be wealthy — and patient — enough to absorb losses for up to five years. The league will need a television contract, of course, but its existence is not predicated on a megabucks deal, at least not at first. The U.F.L. is open to making a smaller deal with a cable network like USA, TNT or Comcast’s Versus network (the former OLN). One mistake other leagues have made, Hambrecht believes, is counting on an upfront TV deal — and bringing in owners who expect to make money instantly.

One television advantage the U.F.L. will have is Friday night. Thanks to the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act, the N.F.L. is prohibited from televising games on most autumn Friday nights. (The prohibition was meant to protect high-school football.) Any new league would have televised football all to itself on that evening.

A new league’s biggest issue, though, is whether it really can approximate the N.F.L.’s level of play. As Daugherty puts it, “If you don’t put a good product on the field, nothing else matters.” When he first signed on, he and Brod immediately began looking into that question — and they came away convinced they could land decent players right away, and very good players eventually.

“Bill Walsh used to tell me that the last 20 players cut from every team were almost interchangeable with the last 20 players to make the team,” Hambrecht says. The new league will hire the best of those last 20 players — along with the best of the Arena players, the Canadian Football League players and so on. Though the U.F.L. will have a salary cap, it will be able to pay those players more than they are making now. It won’t be able to afford to sign marquee names like Peyton Manning or the biggest stars coming out of college, obviously. But the U.F.L. will be able to offer most rookies, who aren’t top draft choices, far more money than the N.F.L. would give them. And since the N.F.L. salary cap has been negotiated with the players’ union, it can’t be unilaterally changed.

“The average career of an N.F.L. player is less than four years,” Daugherty says. “They have a huge incentive to maximize their income.” The new league’s officials think they’ll be able to sign players drafted by the N.F.L. in the second round and later. And one former N.F.L. coach I spoke to — who asked not to be named because he didn’t want people to know he had spoken to the U.F.L. — agreed. “They are going to be able to get players and coaches,” he said. “That’s not going to be a problem.” It’s also worth remembering that many late-round draft choices are good football players. Tom Brady, for instance, was a sixth-round draft choice.

As U.F.L. executives see it, there has really only been one competing league that took the approach they want to take: the old American Football League. The A.F.L. played “11 on 11” football in the fall, mostly in cities where the N.F.L. did not. Its founder, Lamar Hunt, pioneered the concept of revenue-sharing and built a unified league with the staying power to last nine years before it merged with the N.F.L. That is the model the new league wants to emulate. Whether the ultimate goal is to merge with the N.F.L. or play alongside it — well, that’s the one place Hambrecht wasn’t going to go with me. “We’ll just see how it plays out,” he said.

When I asked Roger Noll, a sports economist at Stanford University, whether it is possible to compete with the N.F.L., he laughed, but he didn’t scoff. “The crucial barrier to entry is finding stadiums in the biggest cities,” he replied — something U.F.L. executives insist is not a problem in the places they are considering. “If you can do that, it would be easy to have a league.” Noll pointed out that for wealthy people who want to own a football team, it is far cheaper to start a new league than to try to land an expansion team — which, assuming that the N.F.L. were interested, would cost upward of $800 million. “You need to have enough money to experience losses that will amount to 20 to 30 percent of revenue in the first three or four years,” he said. It’s much cheaper to lose money over that time than to purchase an N.F.L. franchise.

When we met, Hambrecht said: “A guy asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” He shrugged. “I had trouble explaining, except that it made logical sense.” On paper, it does. Whether it plays out that way in real life — who can say? But it’ll be fun to watch. Bill Hambrecht ventures usually are. .

[Harlan Huckleby]

I think it's an ass-kicking great idea! They've really thought this through and learned lessons of the past.


You don't think there's an unfilled market for pro football in LA, Mexico City, Detroit - whups, guess they already got a team of sorts - well, you get the point. There are EASILY 8 cities that will support a pro team.

The idea of fan ownership is fantastic.

[Harlan Huckleby]

I didn't say they'd make money or succeed. I assume they will go broke bidding for talent.

Nah, there are a ton of good football players available. Just looking at my Badger boys, for instance, two of the best players from last year's team ( Stocko on offense, Zewlewski on defense) aren't likely gonna hitch on in the NFL. But they still can play exciting football.

They don't need TOP talent to field an entertaining league.

[MadtownPacker]

Well look what the dog dug up. Great info there HH!

I wonder if I cant get drafted?

[Rastak]

I didn't say they'd make money or succeed. I assume they will go broke bidding for talent.

Nah, there are a ton of good football players available. Just looking at my Badger boys, for instance, two of the best players from last year's team ( Stocko on offense, Zewlewski on defense) aren't likely gonna hitch on in the NFL. But they still can play exciting football.

They don't need TOP talent to field an entertaining league.

So Cuban would settle for less.....that dude has a pretty ego. That alone might doom it.

edit: Greets HH!

edit2: What the hell is a pretty ego....I meant a pretty big ego....

[Harlan Huckleby]

There is no way I would sacrifice that small town high school football experience

lusting for nubile cheerleaders, not-quite-barely-legal eye candy.

[MadtownPacker]

There is no way I would sacrifice that small town high school football experience

lusting for nubile cheerleaders, not-quite-barely-legal eye candy.
Depravity and indecency like only HH can bring it. :lol:

[The Leaper]

Football does not have a lack of "supply". How many millions of fans attend high school football games on Fridays? How many hundreds of millions of fans attend and watch college football on Saturdays? Football is practically on every day of the week from September through November.

This is a losing proposition. It has been tried numerous times since the AFL/NFL merger...all winding up pathetic failures in the end. Why anyone would try it again is beyond me.

[Joemailman]

I think it's an ass-kicking great idea! They've really thought this through and learned lessons of the past.


You don't think there's an unfilled market for pro football in LA, Mexico City, Detroit - whups, guess they already got a team of sorts - well, you get the point. There are EASILY 8 cities that will support a pro team.

The idea of fan ownership is fantastic.

Who could possibly think that fan ownership of a pro Football team could possibly work? :crazy: :mrgreen: :cow:

[RashanGary]

Hey HH, we missed your contrarian viewpoints around here.

[Joemailman]

Contrarian?! He's just confused most of the time.

[Harlan Huckleby]

This is a losing proposition. It has been tried numerous times since the AFL/NFL merger...all winding up pathetic failures in the end. Why anyone would try it again is beyond me.

Nah, they have a fresh approach. They aren't going to bid on premium players. They offer shares of stock to the public for each team, which if it flys, will provide a cushion.

This could be the new Amway. I may have to start selling shares .... I'm jacked up.

[Packgator]

[quote=MJZiggy]


Saturdays are for college football--Badgers(when I can see them) Ducks, and Beavers

What about the Gators?

[oregonpackfan]

There is no way I would sacrifice that small town high school football experience

lusting for nubile cheerleaders, not-quite-barely-legal eye candy.

Any more comments like that, Harlan, and I will authorize the moderators to hire an animal control officer for you. :)

[Partial]

I feel like this was done about 7-8 years ago by another wealthy businessman who liked to break from the status quo. Ask Vince McMahon how that worked out.

[Zool]

Maybe i could talk Cuban into just cutting me a check for 1/2 the money he's going to lose on this venture? At least then it would go to good use.

[Cheesehead Craig]

It all depends on the owners they get.

What if they got Trump and McMahon also?

Trump, McMahon and Cuban combined have enough $, inginuity and balls to make this work. It sure as hell would be interesting.

[cpk1994]

It all depends on the owners they get.

What if they got Trump and McMahon also?

Trump, McMahon and Cuban combined have enough $, inginuity and balls to make this work. It sure as hell would be interesting.

Trump would be more likely(but still a longshot) to get involved. Vince would never enter as just an owner. He won't take orders from anyone. Trump, on the other hand, might make the jump, but his failure his first time with the New Jersey Generals probably keepshim out.