Years ago, I got sent to this workshop — company I was with was doing a bunch of work with Case IH. I was low man on the totem pole and I got sent. Like sending a family rep so you don’t make someone angry. Anyway, they fly me to Chicago for this four-day fun festival on “Taguchi Methods and Linear Arrays” or some damn thing. Long story short this thing is about designing experiments with multiple variables. Party time I am telling you. Real riveting stuff — paper airplanes, melting ice, dumping water, Lego cars — the type of thing where you’re graphing interactions between axle length and rubber band color — But the core idea stuck: test lots of variables at once, measure outcomes, find the signal in the chaos. Sort signal from the noise and which variables are garbage and which ones are meaningful.
So now that I have done my mini flashback episode on Taguchi Methods — That’s exactly what I think is going on with the UFL schedule. It’s a probe. A diagnostic test set of variables by the networks. I really don’t think this is the football guys making calls — it smells like the media side is using this league as a sandbox for bigger questions.
ESPN especially. Fox claimed their turf — Fridays, Saturdays, stable slots. Fox is the control group. ESPN? They’re all over the place throwing pasta at the wall. Tuesdays? Thursdays? That ain’t random ESPN stuff. That’s a multi-variable test with data collection involved. They’re seeing what works and what doesn’t. Does football draw midweek if you strip out the noise and just give people a product with clean film and decent stakes? Can Tuesday be reclaimed? What kind of ratings do you get in Columbus without a month of marketing? Working theory is that the UFL this season is a media analytics lab disguised as a spring football league. The product is fine — but the calendar is the real experiment. Fox plays it safe they like Friday nights — They are doing better than they did with WWE. ESPN runs the chaos engine to stress test unorthodox times and dates. Everyone at league central’s watching the TV numbers to find a path forward.
Great analysis - the interests of NFL media partners are by default NFL interests, but here’s the rub.
Heads the NFL Godfather wins when the NFL media partners win via such spring football ventures, tails the NFL media partners lose when they lose - what a great, low-risk deal for the NFL!
To me the more I look at the UFL it is a supply chain situation. And the NFL is trying to build a paralell supply chain for employees. The CFL can produce a handful of crossover guys each year, but structurally the CFL is boxed in — 180 American spots league-wide and a season that overlaps the NFL calendar. That’s a supply chain bottleneck. Good football? Hell yes — But the system itself limits player throughput. The UFL, on the other hand, even though the product isn’t as polished — is giving the NFL a ton of film and NFL-adjacent athletes — all wrapped in a neat 10-week package that ends in early summer. If you need a few bodies for training camp — You don’t have to wait. You get them mid-June, not mid-November.
To me that’s the big differentiator between the UFL and CFL — timing and throughput. The CFL quality of play is better but the — UFL gives you a pipeline of fringe-NFLers with recent game tape. In my evolving worldview — the UFL is turning into supply chain mechanics. The NFL is a machine that needs cheap, available, plug-and-play labor at scale. CFL can’t scale and provide throughput. Also that is not the CFL’s mission to be the NFL’s employee training ground and supply chain. The UFL is heading that direction or is already there and they are just retooling the framework.
Every team is having a fan event over the next week or 2. Coach Becht said they’re expecting about 1k folks in Orlando which is huge if true, as Orlando is the weakest of the 3 new markets. Repole has been on a roll lately. The league is also hiring brand ambassadors and built a following of 30 local businesses to partner with in Louisville.
Friday night football is essentially the UFL SNF game of the week, so its no surprise there. The Tuesday game in Dallas is odd but looks like they’re making it a themed night playing off the NCAA championship the night before. Thursday night in Louisville is another themed night piggybacking off the Kentucky Derby. DC not having a home game til week 3 is disappointing but not unexpected as the 3 soccer teams there take precedent. I do like the fact that DC plays 4 Saturday afternoon home games and the lone Sunday on Memorial Day weekend. That should ensure I get to at least 2-3 home games this year.
Wow, that was a very long time lost on the high seas, but I’m happy you could find us, as is Superb Owl, whom I’ve had to avoid for a bit over this fiasco in the works, for he’s very angry.
I won’t tell him you showed up again yet.
Bullshit on Repole though for what he’s done in the wrong direction to form essentially this UFL 5.0, which is a “shadow relaunch.”
I think this is yet another sign, sort of like the poor slate of universities selected for that stupid regional draft and also the television schedule for St. Louis, that for some reason the league is trying to railroad St. Louis to promote some of the new teams, for it’s all about Repole and his bloated ego already now.
Going to have to disagree with you here. Billboards are up in most markets, every team is having a fan fest over the next week or 2, several themed nights this season, mascots on their way, and way more interest in the new markets than any of the folded teams with the exception of Michigan. The coaching carousel doesnt really bother me much. Stoops has an under .500 spring football record and Holtz didn’t want the full time commitment the league is now asking of their coaches. Is everything peaches and cream, of course not. However, this is by far the most off-season momentum I’ve seen a spring league garner since XFL 2020.
You make some fine points, even though I don’t agree at all with your conclusion, but this part and then some about the turnover of coaches is heavy on the sugar-coating balderdash, including with references from some prior conversation we had at the old place before it was destroyed whilst it was going to be destroyed anyway, as it was also prudently looted and here we are.
Here’s a flashback on what happened in that regard, which you probably missed.
The coaching turnover was because Repole cut deals with the old coaches via severance because he wanted to slash those costs as well, as he brought on generally inexperienced coaches.
Remember that savings from otherwise rightfully getting rid of those staid general managers and Jerrah’s stooge Daryl “Moose” Johnston, which was pandered as to be re-invested in more money for the coaches?
As I and others held off on buying the latter claims being made after the savings were already in the bank, that money indeed sure did not go to the coaches, as you and others professed would be the case, and it remains in the UFL’s coffers.
Nope, I’m not giving Repole yet another “the magic of spring football” innovative pass on that one as always do those damn fanboys, which you are doing here again even though of course you are not one of those fanboys.
Coaches are now full-time employees receiving benefits where in the past they were part-time, seasonal employees. I’m sure the cost per game is less but once you add a decent benefits package I’m sure the new coaches are making somewhere in the $200-300k range. It says something that Shannon Harris stuck around in DC instead of taking Reggie Barlows invitation to be Coordinator at Tennessee St. Stoops and Nolan were likely one foot out the door to begin with, the only coach that was really “lost” was Skip Holtz. While that undoubtedly is a big loss AJ McCarron had a lineup hundreds of folks long at the Birmingham Bowl looking for an autograph, something Holtz could never bring regardless of how many titles he won.
When we look at the facts on the numbers of coaches being sent off or leaving, this part is heavy spin and BULLSHIT, though you do have some minor points otherwise.
Now the fact that you or somebody else do not like the old coaches is irrelevant to the point of all the money saved in that process, which of course has been Repole’s real motive as a businessman quite simply, after severance deals were cut with some of the older coaches.
Otherwise there is no reason to be so sold on inexperienced coaches, let alone on the matter of any local star power in a place like Alabama where SEC football will always rule, but hey, you fall for that too now if you will.
TV viewership is down ~20%, yeah, but Fox still holding those Friday night slots tells me they see some strategic upside. Even if they are losing money they are not losing as much as they lost with the WWE. They had WWE for years—didn’t love the ROI—and still kept that window. If this was AAF‑level bleeding, those slots would be gone already.
To me, the UFL is less XFL 2.0 and more NBADL v1—an incubator league, NFL-adjacent, not direct property. @Paolo_X has been screaming about the NFL as the godfather for years. The cap’s pushing $300M next year, and if even 1% of that flows into spring ball — through back channels — to Fox, Redbird and the new owner — that’s real money. I think they’re trying to ride this out, refine the ops, and make it lean and clean enough to flip—like RedBird’s Repole’s playbook elsewhere.
My lizard brain also thinks one of the unspoken pillars of this UFL thing is how bad the NIL chaos has scrambled the old NFL pipeline. The NCAA used to be a predictable farm system; now it’s portal roulette, holdouts, and side deals with boosters. Right wrong or no one watching on TV — the UFL as constructed offers the Godfather a clean, ten-game UFL tape season with NFL-lite schemes and pro coaching. Grown men vs grown men, no Bama Troy state — suddenly looks a lot more attractive to scouts trying to cut through the noise of the NCAA/NIL hellscape. We underestimate how much the Godfather values control—and this gives them a window to retake some of it.
