Reading some tea leaves from the announcement of the agenda from the CFL winter meetings here,
let’s review an additional bit of this spring football league history and some thoughts.
Now via the launch of the USFL 2.0 hub league, the NFL had its cake, as in eliminated liability and no prospect of long-term payments to as many players in its pool, from which it could eat as well, via a cheap-ass venture to build an alternative pipeline of more affordable players for special teams and so forth.
As the pandemic finally began to end, the time was especially relevant since these new Rich or “Rich” Men on Campus, since the summer of 2021, were going to be weighing more options than the NFL Draft in their later years of eligibility (with now the ongoing discussion of a potential 5th year for Division 1 and 2 college athletes), and well five years after NIL was available to all young adults in college, here we are already.
The NFL still has this cake, though the spring football experiment has cost their proxies vastly more than budgeted and whatever the NFL has made good via other payments and arrangements with its partners in the NFL media and RedBird Capital.
As discussed, however the UFL will attempt to dress things up, the UFL is overhauling via a cost-cutting effort and looking more and more like a temporary employment agency for the NFL by the week.
The CFL smells the opportunity, especially given the adverse experience of 2023, as cited.
Now it’s the NFL’s move. The NFL can continue to try and have their cake and eat from it too. Or as it’s the NFL, they can weigh in large now behind the scenes to jolt the UFL anew, as in to make it more lucrative to the players than ever before.
We shall see.