Are you ready for some (rebooted intellectual property) football?
Sure, baseball season is finally underway, and basketball and hockey are beginning their long playoff marches, but the new eight-team United States Football League debuts Saturday night with a simulcast opener between the New Jersey Generals and the Birmingham Stallions.
If those names are familiar, you’re probably a boomer or Gen Xer recalling the original USFL. That league made a huge, expensive, and chaotic splash as a springtime league from 1983-85 before a bid to challenge the NFL’s fall pro football TV monopoly doomed it to bankruptcy.
TV networks and wealthy investors for decades have been on a grail quest when it comes to spring pro football, and Fox and NBC are the latest to try to crack the code.
The new USFL is a lower-level property – think of it as a developmental league for players, coaches, officials and network staffers – that uses some of the old team names and colors but is otherwise unrelated to the original league. The new entity, announced in June 2021, is majority owned by Fox Sports and is also partnered with NBC to air/stream games. The league exists primarily to fill time in the networks’ springtime and early summer lineups.
Viewership ultimately will determine if USFL 2.0 lives or dies.
The Generals-Stallions game airs at 7:30 p.m. ET from new 47,100-seat Protective Stadium in Birmingham, Ala. In fact, all games this season will be played there or at Birmingham’s venerable Legion Field (71,000 seats) to keep costs down until the teams eventually move into their home markets.
The game will be broadcast live simultaneously by Fox and NBC. It’s said to be the first such scheduled live football simulcast since Super Bowl I was carried by CBS and NBC in January 1967.