Just for fun, suppose you are a pro football fan from, say, Philadelphia. That would mean you probably like/love/fixate on the Eagles. It would probably mean that you’d root for any other pro football team attaching “Philadelphia” to its nickname, as long as it did not play in the fall.
Philadelphia and seven other cities, states or regions are getting new pro football teams next month, when the second version of the United States Football League makes its debut. The Philadelphia team will be called the Stars, after the team in the first iteration of the USFL.
Although the Philadelphia Stars last played a USFL game in 1984 before spending their final season in Baltimore, the team’s name seems logical, perhaps until you find out that they won’t be playing any games in Philadelphia for at least this season and maybe in 2023.
All USFL teams, bar one, won’t play any “home” games this year, because the 10-game regular season will be played at two stadiums in Birmingham, Alabama (home of the Stallions), with the USFL playoffs scheduled to be played in Canton, Ohio. Birmingham was booked.
So it goes for the newest NFL rival. Perhaps the new USFL – which league officials stress is not associated with the old USFL or its owners – will draw plenty of fans tuning into Fox, FS1, NBC, USA and Peacock thirsting for out-of-NFL-season pro football action.
The first version of the USFL, which also had a spring schedule, lasted three seasons in the 1980s, and it was somewhat successful before a notorious USFL team owner aiming to use the team to elbow his way into the NFL ran the league into the ground.
That owner was Donald J Trump, a relatively obscure New York real-estate developer at the time who, you may have heard, went on to find other work. That USFL included several future NFL stars – Steve Young, Jim Kelly, Reggie White, Herschel Walker – but Trump became the name most synonymous with that USFL, and not in a good way.
This USFL is a new entity controlled by Fox Sports, the sports programming division of the Fox Corporation, which owns the news channel closely associated with the ex-president. The first game in the eight-team league, pitting New Jersey and Birmingham, will be televised by Fox and NBC.
Yes, the New Jersey Generals and Birmingham Stallions. There were two teams with those names in the old USFL; Trump owned the Generals. The other six teams are named after old USFL teams, with the same logos and colors, and similar helmets and uniforms.
By filing a lawsuit Monday, some owners and executives from the old USFL made it clear they don’t like the idea of reusing those names. Fox is “claiming the legacy of something it didn’t build,” says Nicholas Matich of the McKool Smith law firm, which represents the group called Real USFL LLC.
Larry Csonka, the Hall of Fame Miami Dolphins fullback who was the general manager of the USFL’s Jacksonville Bulls and is the initial manager of the group, said in a news release: “It boils down to this: If the USFL doesn’t have any value, why did Fox want it?”
It is, to say the least, an unusual branding approach, since the last USFL game was played 37 years ago. The league was killed off after Trump, seeking to move the USFL to the fall, won an antitrust suit against the NFL but was awarded all of $3 in damages.
Meet the old gang: Houston Gamblers, Michigan Panthers, New Orleans Breakers, Pittsburgh Maulers and Tampa Bay Bandits, plus the Stars, Generals and Stallions. (The Bulls, Los Angeles Express and Memphis Showboats were among those who did not make the cut.)
To resurrect team and league names is not unheard of in pro sports. The American Football League that fully merged with the NFL in 1970 was actually the fourth AFL, following versions in 1926, 1936-37 and 1940-41. There was also an All-American Football Conference.
The New York Yankees were in the first three versions of the AFL, and teams known as the Cincinnati Bengals were members of the last three AFLs. (A team from AFL II, the Cleveland Rams, jumped to the NFL in 1937 and still exist as the Los Angeles Rams.)
But this is the first time an entire league is using nicknames and colors from an old league by the same name. The league won’t say why. Jeff Pearlman, who wrote the entertaining 2018 book about the old USFL, Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL, was asked by the Guardian recently what he thought about this arrangement.
“I truly have no idea,” Pearlman replied. “I’ve been trying to get my head around it, but I can’t. Also, they’re not even making it about the old league. At all. So they have the helmets, unis and team names, but no nostalgia. I’m befuddled.”
Most of the old trademarks were picked up by the co-founder of the new USFL, Brian Woods, from something called the A-11 Football League, which folded in 2014 before it played a game. Woods had run a showcase league called The Spring League from 2017 to 2021.
Woods seems to have no illusions that this USFL, some or all of it, will merge with the NFL. That was the downfall of the first USFL. Trump bought the Generals after their first season and spent the next two years trying to convince the other owners to move the league to the fall, at which point, Trump believed, the NFL would take in some USFL teams, namely, his.
Myles Tanenbaum, the Stars’ owner, did not want to move the USFL to the fall. The Stars, coached by Jim Mora, were built to win, playing in all three USFL title games, winning in 1984 while playing in Philadelphia, then in 1985 when it practiced at several places, including Pimlico Race Track, and played its home games in College Park, Maryland, 30 miles from Baltimore.
And, at least for now, the Stars are back, although they are not the same people, and they are not literally back in town. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a short story last week on the Stars’ likely new quarterback, just in case people might be interested.