Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Donald Trump for Killing the USFL

Donald Trump and Herschel Walker

March 6, 1983: The United States Football League begins play.

July 29, 1986: The USFL won its antitrust lawsuit against the National Football League -- but the jury awarded damages of just $1.00. With antitrust awarded trebled, and appeals leading to inflation, the check the NFL eventually wrote came to $3.76. That's right: Three dollars and seventy-six cents.

Why did the USFL sue? Because they needed the money to go head-to-head with the NFL by playing in the Fall, instead of in Spring and Summer. Whose idea was that? The owner of the team in the New York market, the New Jersey Generals.

His name was Donald Trump.

There's a saying: "Everything Trump touches dies." But is he really the person primarily responsible for the USFL folding?

Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Donald Trump for Killing the USFL

5. The Commissioners. Chet Simmons was named the USFL's 1st Commissioner. He was a very successful TV sports executive. But he expanded the league too fast: They had 12 teams in 1983, but it jumped to 18 in 1984. That was too many: Instead of more good players and more good teams, there were more bad players, more bad teams, and more bad ownership situations.

He resigned in 1985, shortly before the 3rd season began. He was replaced by Harry Usher -- who, by a weird coincidence, shared his birthday with the USFL: March 6, 1939. He was happy to plunge the league into the antitrust suit, which was a huge mistake. After the verdict, he canceled the 1986 season, and that was all she wrote.

To put it another way: Pete Rozelle, then the Commissioner of the NFL, is often regarded as the greatest Commissioner any sports league has ever had, and putting Simmons and Usher up against Rozelle was like putting a couple of middleweights up against Muhammad Ali. Simmons and Usher may have meant well, but, if you'll pardon the pun, they were way out of Rozelle's league.

4. The Markets. The USFL had to have teams in the 3 biggest markets: New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The teams in those markets didn't do well, and that was bad enough. But the USFL made big mistakes in putting teams head-to-head with established NFL teams.

Yes, they were smart to put teams in markets that didn't have NFL teams at the time: Birmingham, Jacksonville, Memphis, Orlando and Phoenix. In particular, putting teams in Baltimore and Oakland, which had both just lost teams, was a good idea. And the teams in Detroit and Tampa Bay seemed to do better on the field than the NFL teams in those markets.

But putting teams in Boston, Denver, Detroit, Houston, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Washington was a mistake. And some of the markets that didn't have NFL teams simply weren't able to support a team: Portland, San Antonio and Tulsa. Portland and San Antonio might have a big enough metro area to support an NFL team now, but they didn't then. Oklahoma City might now have one, but Tulsa likely never will.

3. The Other Owners. Some overstated their ability to pay expenses. Some underestimated the difficulties in running a professional football franchise. Some abandoned their teams when they realized that they would have to compete with NFL teams directly in Autumn 1986.

There were 18 separate teams in the USFL. Only 6 -- the Birmingham Stallions, the Denver Gold, the Los Angeles Express, the New Jersey Generals, the Oakland Invaders and the Tampa Bay Bandits -- played all 3 seasons without moving.

And, of those, the Gold were merged into the Jacksonville Bulls in anticipation of the Autumn move (as were the Houston Gamblers, into the Generals); the Bandits were in a hopeless situation, since their owner, John Bassett, previously having been easily the most competent owner in the league, was dying of a brain tumor and was not properly functional, putting the team in financial meltdown; and the Express were even worse financially, forcing the league to take over ownership.

It wasn't a total failure, though: The Jacksonville Jaguars showed that pro football could succeed in their city; the Arizona Wranglers showed that it could succeed in the Phoenix area; the Memphis Showboats showed that it could succeed in Tennessee, although the Houston Oilers would play only 1 season in Memphis before moving to Nashville to become the Tennessee Titans; and the Oakland Invaders showed that the problem in Oakland wasn't the market on the East side of San Francisco Bay, it was Al Davis' greed. (Or, given that the Raiders have now abandoned Oakland for a 2nd time, I should say, the Davis family's greed.)

2. The NFL. They are unbeatable. There have been 9 challengers to them: The 1926 American Football League, the 1936-37 AFL, the 1940-41 AFL, the 1946-49 All-American Football Conference, the 1960-69 AFL, the 1974-75 World Football League, the 1983-85 USFL, the 2001 XFL, and the 2019 Alliance of American Football. (I'm not counting the new XFL, because their result is yet to be determined.)

* The 1960-69 AFL succeeded, mainly because they were run by Al Davis, who was not only mean, like Trump; but smart, unlike Trump.

* The AAFC succeeded to the point where 3 of its teams were absorbed into the NFL: The Cleveland Browns, the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Colts.

* The 1936-37 AFL got 1 team absorbed into the NFL, the franchise now known as the Los Angeles Rams.

* The others failed completely. The WFL failed so hard, they suspended operations in the middle of their 2nd season; the AAF, late in the regular season of their 1st.

To put it another way: The NFL has now played a full 100 seasons; all of its challengers combined, 26 -- 16 if you take out the '60s AFL.

The NFL learned its lesson from its dealings with the '60s AFL: Take control of the narrative. Let people know that they are the real football league, and that all others are pale imitations. This, as much as anything else, is the reason the USFL didn't have a good chance.

But one reason stands out above all others:

1. Conditioning. And I don't mean the players staying in good condition. I mean the way sports fans are conditioned.

Most people just aren't interested in watching football in the Spring and the Summer. Even with the Super Bowl extending the NFL season into the 1st week of February, they are trained to think of February to June as basketball and hockey season; and April to October as baseball season.

Colleges have training camps, and their annual intrasquad (Solid Color vs. White/Gray/Gold) game, in the Spring. But they don't have games that count in the Spring. High schools? Some States have Spring football, but most don't. For most Americans, Spring football was just... weird.

And as for the Summer, who wants to sit in 90-degree heat for 3 hours, without the natural breaks of innings giving you a good chance to cool off, get food, or use the bathroom?

The World League of American Football (sponsored by the NFL, so not a direct challenger) played in the Spring in 1991 and 1992. The AAF played last Spring. The original XFL played in the Spring and Summer in 2001, and all failed. The new XFL has started again, and attendance and TV ratings are pitiful.

If the funding, and the competent ownership of the teams, had been in place from the start in 1982-83, and the USFL had consolidated to the point where, with the possible exception of the Generals and the Express (got to have the New York and Los Angeles markets), no team was playing in the same market as an NFL team, they could have survived a while longer, possibly long enough to get their 4 best teams (commercially, not necessarily competitively) absorbed into the NFL in a mini-merger.

Under those conditions, Trump, for one of the few times in his life, would have been right.

VERDICT: Not Guilty. As much as I would like to blame Trump for the USFL folding -- after all, I loved that the Generals, unlike the Giants and the Jets, actually called themselves "New Jersey" instead of "New York" -- it just doesn't work.

Think of this analogy: The USFL was a hospital patient, dying of many things. Trump was an incompetent doctor, but even if he had been competent, the patient's chances of survival were not good.

Or to use a legal analogy: If it were a civil case, where a preponderance of the evidence was needed, maybe we could find against Trump; but, in a criminal case, where guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, he can't be convicted -- of this charge.