USFL—The $1 League

by: Richard Weaver
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They were supposed to be the rot and refuse, a bunch of has-beens, never-weres and never-will-bes. Their value? One dollar. One lousy buck. But for three action-packed spring seasons - 1983-85 - they were the United States Football League - the USFL - the latest failed attempt to wrestle the monopoly on professional football away from the NFL.

During its three years on the field, the USFL sported four Heisman Trophy winners: Herschel Walker, Mike Rozier, Doug Flutie and two-time winner Archie Griffin. And after the league folded, former USFL players made up nearly 40 percent of NFL rosters from 1986 to 1989. From the midst of what was supposed to be a rag-tag group of NFL wannabes, the USFL produced two Super Bowl MVPs, numerous Pro Bowlers and the most prolific passer in Canadian Football League history, Flutie.

From has-been to could-be to been-there - the story of the USFL in a nutshell.

The USFL officially began May 24, 1982, at New York's 21 Club, and ended July 25, 1986, in a Manhattan U.S. District courtroom. At the 21 Club, league founder David F. Dixon and 12 newly appointed owners held a press conference announcing the birth of spring football. They discussed the proposed 12-team, 20-game schedule, which would begin in March and culminate with a league championship in July. But after three years of play, a poor decision to move to the fall and a one-dollar settlement in an anti-trust suit against the NFL, the league folded just as quickly as it had begun.

Spring football was the brainchild of Dixon, a native of New Orleans. He was instrumental to the city in acquiring the Saints franchise and in getting the Louisiana Superdome built. He originally derived the idea of springtime football around 1964. In an attempt to get an NFL franchise in his hometown, he hinted about starting his own league if the city was denied a team. But after the league awarded New Orleans a franchise in 1967, Dixon packed his plan in mothballs for a later date.

It was not until the press conference in 1982 that the idea resurfaced.

"American football is easily the best spectator sport in the world, in my opinion, and still is for that matter," Dixon says. "At the time, and over the years, I have observed that college football's practice games in the spring draw some pretty huge crowds. We thought (spring football) would be a very good thing and it was. The USFL was a success. Every bit was up to our expectations.

"We had very good owners and very good cities. Any stadium used by the National Football League was available to us then and would be available to us now under anti-trust law. We didn't have any difficulty with good stadiums or good cities. And really, the weather is probably better in the spring than it is in the fall and winter. So we had good weather, too."

The USFL gave football fans an opportunity to follow their favorite sport year-round. With the new spring league, gridiron maniacs did not have an off-season. But besides the spring season, the USFL offered its fans another unique opportunity by guaranteeing that they would see hometown stars on their professional teams. By assigning universities to USFL teams, the league implemented a territorial draft before a round-by-round draft of rookie free agents. So, for example, the Arizona Wranglers had an opportunity to choose players from Arizona, Arizona State, Northern Arizona, New Mexico and New Mexico State before any other USFL team could acquire those players' services.

But while the USFL gave fans a new fix for football, it also gave potential players something new, too - an opportunity. It provided players a second chance - and in some cases a first chance - to play pro football.

Says Indianapolis Colts head coach Jim Mora, former coach of the Philadelphia/ Baltimore Stars and the most successful coach in USFL history, "It was an opportunity. . . a second chance for some veterans who had previous tryouts or previous tenures with an NFL team. They felt like this was an opportunity for them to play professional football, to make a football team and be involved in professional football. You couldn't ask for a more eager, hard-working, enthusiastic group. It also was the start for a lot of guys like Kelvin Bryant, Jim Kelly, Steve Young and Bart Oates. Those guys had never been on an NFL team before. We had a lot of excellent young players. It was their first chance.

"The league was vastly underrated. We had some excellent players. . . and excellent coaches. During those three years, it never got the credit it deserved. Just look at the last 10 or 15 years at the players who played in that league and had great careers in the NFL."

One of those players was linebacker Sam Mills. Before starring with the NFL's New Orleans Saints and Carolina Panthers, Mills was a member of Mora's Stars. But before his three-year stint in the USFL, Mills had been cut by the Cleveland Browns and the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL.

"Sam certainly was capable of playing," Mora says. "I mean, he made five Pro Bowls in the NFL. So, somebody made a mistake when they cut him from the Browns and the Canadian team. Somebody screwed up."

The league secured television rights with ABC and began a new trend in professional sports by signing a contract with the cable-based network ESPN. Cable television was relatively new then and Dixon and the USFL owners saw it as an opportunity to solidify the league financially.

After the initial press conference, the USFL soon made headlines across the country. The newly formed league shocked the pro football world by signing 1982 Heisman winner Herschel Walker. After winning college football's top honor as a junior, Walker signed with the USFL with a year of college eligibility remaining - a nearly unprecedented event in the NFL at the time.

Eventually, the league was forgiven for the act, considered taboo in the NFL. Today, underclassmen entering pro football are commonplace, but Walker was among the first.

Teams were slated for 11 NFL cities, with the USFL fielding the Boston Breakers, New Jersey Generals, Chicago Blitz, Denver Gold, Philadelphia Stars, Michigan Panthers, Washington Federals, Tampa Bay Bandits and Oakland Invaders. A team was to be located in San Diego, but after stadium lease problems, it moved north to Los Angeles and became the L.A. Express. Another team first set for Los Angeles moved to Phoenix to become Arizona Wranglers. The only original team not in an established NFL market was the Birmingham Stallions.

USFL teams first hit the field for opening-day action on March 6, 1983. Average attendance was an impressive 39,000 per game. National television ratings were 14.2 with a 33 share. Translation: 14.2 percent of television households and 33 percent of people watching television at that time witnessed the coming-out party for Dixon's invention. And according to Dixon, the league averaged a six rating throughout its first season.

"It wasn't NFL ratings," says Dixon. "The NFL was averaging about a 15 (rating) then, but a six was very, very profitable for ABC."

On the success of its first season, the USFL received expansion applications from 24 cities across the United States. Eventually, the league awarded new franchises to Jacksonville, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, Memphis and Houston. And so were born the Bulls, Maulers, Gunslingers, Showboats and Gamblers. A sixth new franchise was awarded again to San Diego, but again the team had trouble gaining access to then-Jack Murphy Stadium and again moved, this time finding refuge in Oklahoma as the Outlaws.

In other moves, the Breakers left Boston for New Orleans, business tycoon Donald Trump purchased the Generals and eventually spearheaded the league's move into the fall to duke it out head-to-head with the NFL. And meanwhile, Blitz owner Dr. Ted Dietrich and Wranglers owner Jim Joseph pulled off the biggest trade in sports history, swapping for each other's entire team - players, coaches, staff and all.

In its sophomore season, the USFL began signing bigger-named players. In 1984, the league signed 20 of the top 48 college prospects. The USFL also began signing players who were still under contract away from the NFL. This group included high-level players like Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor and Bengals wide receiver Chris Collinsworth. The terms of the deals were that the players would play out their current NFL deals and then join the fledgling USFL thereafter.

One prominent player who actually did make the jump between the two leagues was safety Gary Barbaro. A starter for seven seasons and a three-time Pro Bowl pick for the Kansas City Chiefs, Barbaro found himself in a heated contract dispute following the 1982 season. Feeling he was not tendered an offer worthy of his services by the Chiefs, Barbaro elected to sit out the 1983 NFL season and join the New Jersey Generals for their second season.

"I think my leaving the NFL and coming right off my third Pro Bowl year and still being considered in the prime of my career had a bearing on what some players did as far as deciding to make the move (to the USFL) or not," says Barbaro. "The league needed. . . a shot in the arm, to have some names at least that were recognizable from the NFL.

"They did have a lot of talent (in the USFL). Herschel Walker and Jim Kelly - those guys were real talents. But I think what the league was trying to do was get some quick validity with some names the people could recognize a little more readily than a player who was just starting to come up."

Some NFLers who joined Barbaro in the USFL included former Chicago Bears quarterback Vince Evans, former Buffalo Bills running back Joe Cribbs, former Cincinnati Bengals tight end Dan Ross and former Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Doug Williams. These "name" players jumped the smooth-sailing NFL ship to play for "no-name" teams like the Blitz, the Stallions, the Breakers and the Outlaws.

Even without the influx of name players, the amount of original talent in the USFL was evident to Barbaro: "I remember seeing Herschel Walker for the first time and all that speed he had. Now, I had been around some fast players in the NFL, but it was one of the first practices (with the Generals) and everybody's running 40 times, and I'm watching him run 4.2's on grass in football cleats. That was a little amazing."

By expanding and bidding for top talent, USFL owners began offering huge sums of money - sometimes, money they did not have. After the 1984 season, the Chicago and Pittsburgh franchises folded. Financial realities could no longer be pushed into the corner of the end zone. Michigan merged with Oakland. Oklahoma merged with Arizona. The Breakers moved again, this time to Portland. The Stars moved to Baltimore, and the Federals moved to Orlando and assumed a new name, the Renegades.

"Once the league got started, the owners seemed to get impatient. . . I think they lost sight that the best objective of any business is to make money and not lose money," Dixon, who had left the league by this time, says. "They began to spend for ego reasons and competitive reasons rather than for business purposes."

In order to keep some teams on the playing field for the 1985 season, the league assumed the financial responsibilities of the Los Angeles and Houston franchises. The money the league was making on television and other league-based revenues was being drained by bankrupt teams.

The USFL had failed Economics: 101, but the league's demise really began in August 1984. A two-thirds majority of league owners voted to move its games to the fall beginning with the '86 season. Three months later, the league threw a last-minute Hail Mary, filing a $1.32 billion anti-trust suit against the NFL.

The case, heard by Federal Court Judge Peter Leisure, began in May 1986 and lasted nearly three months. The list of witnesses read like a who's who of professional football: ABC announcer Howard Cossell, Raiders owner Al Davis, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle and Generals owner Donald Trump all were called to testify. The future of the USFL hung in the balance. Throughout, however, the USFL's case looked like first and goal from the one-foot line.

It proved to be a long foot.

Although the six-person jury found the NFL guilty of anti-trust violations and declared it a monopoly, the USFL very clearly had won the battle but lost the war. The jury presented the league a damage award of just one dollar, which trebled under anti-trust law, amounted to a final amount of a whopping three dollars.

"The whole trial was looking so good," Greg Singleton, former media relations director of the San Antonio Gunslingers, recalls. "We're sitting there, licking our chops, thinking this is going to establish us forever. Sure enough, here it comes. Because (the jury) didn't know how to judge the worth of a contract, the worth of a television contract or the worth of a stadium lease, they thought the judge would do that. So, they just gave us a dollar and that was it."

The league, now consolidated down to eight teams, put plans for the 1986 fall season on hold and released most of its players to find jobs in the NFL and CFL. After several appeals, all upholding the original decision and reward, the USFL gasped its last breath in early 1988.

"The fatal flaw, in my estimation, was the desire to push the USFL into a fall schedule with the NFL," Awbrey Norris, former business manager for the Memphis Showboats, says. "It was too early to push the lawsuit. The teams were not on par with the NFL teams and would not have the drawing power that the NFL had at that time. I expect a few more years of spring football would have leveled the playing field between the leagues.

"This type of parity could have led to some type of arrangement between the two leagues. We had some extremely good players. Reggie White is a good example on the Memphis Showboats."

Dixon agrees: "Our owners really became a little impatient on moving to the fall under the influence of Donald Trump, who is a good friend and a good person. I have nothing but high regard for Donald, but I think we should have stayed in the spring and continued our steady growth. Our television package was going to be quadrupled in the next couple of years."

Dixon also remains baffled by the amount awarded in the court case: "How can you find somebody guilty of anti-trust violations and only award one dollar?"

Despite the league surviving only three years, some of the innovations brought forth by the USFL are still evident today. It was the first to use instant replay and the first pro league since the AFL to use the two-point conversion. Both rules are on the books today in the NFL.

Several professional football records that still stand today were set on USFL playing fields including the longest game in history, set in 1984 when the L.A. Express and the Michigan Panthers played 93 minutes and 33 seconds in a game consisting of three overtimes.

Former USFL players and coaches have also impacted today's NFL. White is the NFL's all-time sack leader. Kelly went on to lead Buffalo to four Super Bowls, and Steve Young succeeded Joe Montana in San Francisco where he carved out a Hall of Fame career of his own with the 49ers.

Mora and Cardinals head man Vince Tobin coached together with the Stars, and you may recall that University of Florida head coach Steve Spurrier first honed his "Fun-n-Gun" offense while leading the Tampa Bay Bandits.

Reunions of USFL teams are becoming a more regular occurrence as the memories of the league begin to fade. San Antonio had one last a couple of years ago.

Said Singleton before the reunion: "I was talking to (former Gunslingers linebacker) Rick D'Amico about the reunion the other day and he asked if (former team owner Clinton Manges) was going. I said that I understood that Mr. Manges was very ill and not doing very well. . . I didn't think I was going to invite him.

"(D'Amico) said to invite him anyway. He also said, 'You know what I'd do? I'd go right up to him, give him a big ol' hug and say, 'Mr. Manges, thank you for giving me the opportunity to play football.'

"I think that's the way most of the guys feel now," says Singleton. "At the time, there were ups and downs. But deep down, they knew they were getting a chance that they might not have normally gotten."

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