Some have already used the hot mess that is UFL 2012 as evidence that an alternative league will never work. One of the challenges in this approach, in my opinion, is the challenges that the UFL generated for themselves.

The investors and leadership were always unwilling, or unable, to allow a foundation to be laid and then continue the work from there.

I remember when the UFL announced a delay from the fall of 2008 to the fall of 2009. At the time Commissioner Huyghue promised that they would announce teams during the summer of 2008 and build towards a proper kickoff, they did not announce teams until February of 2009.

The challenges for a February announcement were many. Among them, Turnstyles Ticketing told the league they needed 18 months to really sell tickets and the league would end up giving them two months.

The only season that had some level of building was 2010 as we were able to begin hiring team staff in February and March of that year. Even then we were constrained by a number of things — Hartford didn't really have staff until mid-July, Omaha did not launch until late April.

I remember the energy at a board meeting in June when Mark Cuban attended and the league announced a sixth team in Virginia Beach. Just a few months later I had tickets booked to travel to Portland to announce team seven - which ended up not happening.

At the time, however, it seemed like we had learned the lessons of 2009. Unfortunately financial difficulties at the end of the season lead to a low energy 2011 as we had a very late start building the league, folded the Orlando and Hartford franchises and generally killed the momentum.

Even then the league might have been Ok with retooling in 2012 if they had only kept staff around and built on what did go right in 2011 (pretty good attendance aside from Vegas for one) — but they did not.

Consider those challenges, minimal marketing budgets aside from 2010 (and even then we were a fraction of, say, an MLS team), and it is amazing what the league was able to accomplish in a crowded fall marketplace.

Dusty I am with you. I was at the first league meeting in 2009 here in Orlando and was interested to say the least. There was a lot of ideas talked about during those meetings those couple of days. Obvious season one had some issues with marketing the league. Here is Orlando few people even knew of the Tuskers. Season Two seemed better, local PR, local marketing there were actually ads in the papers and on the radio. They went from ONE billboard to three !

I would love to hear about some of the ideas from the 2009 meeting. One of my memories was seeing people in your photos that were never heard from again — many of whom had impressive resumes.

But even with the local marketing it still lacked. Things as simple as s hat give a way to bring interest to the Tuskers was done the LAST game of the season. Little things like that left me scratching my head. But my belief, like yours was renewed in Omaha championship week. The hype was good, fan interest was great, and the atmosphere game day was awesome. But then the season ended and all hell broke loose here in Orland.

Nation one of ideas which I never understood why, other than to save money, was to have two training sites - here and Casa Grande, Arizona. Orlando was the only team to train where it played. Both California and Vegas were in Arizona and traveled for HOME games. New York also trained here in Orlando.

Centralized PR and marketing was the other.
And yes, there seemed to be several good people who were there at the meeting in Feb, but gone by kick off in September. Unfortunately I don't remember all of their names.

Many of the measures were cost cutting and time saving because of the financial/time constraints. For example, Turnstyles said we needed eighteen months to sell tickets with local staff — it ended up being two months with zero local staff in year one and two-six months with half the staff they needed in year two.

There really is just one overriding problem with the UFL - undercapitalization. In alternative football, you need to spend money to make money. A thriving eight-team league by now would be a money-maker. The league as it currently is constituted never will be one.