In the second year of the new USFL, and the first year of XFL 3.0, both leagues were nearly identical in viewership on TV. Both leagues are making it into another year, at least as of now they are. But I think that the only way they work long term is to either merge, or one of, if not both leagues, will die out.
Why should the two leagues merge?
There simply isn’t enough room in the market for 2 professional spring football leagues. They are sucking the life away from each other. Both viewership and talent levels are killed by the amount of teams fighting for talent and views.
In my opinion, the XFL has a better product. The USFL is a hard watch. The XFL attracted a lot of star power that used to be pretty big stars in the NFL. But if they merged, and put their resources together, they could make a pretty strong, consistent league.
How would it work?
I think that what holds these leagues down is that the talent pool is drained between the 16 teams in 2 leagues. If you look closely, there’s usually 2-3 teams in each league that look nowhere near the talent of other teams. So if they merged, they could cut the number of teams down to 12 or even 10. That would stack all the talent on to a lesser amount of teams.
Let’s go through a few scenarios of how it would work. They could keep each league at 8 teams, and only play the champions. That wouldn’t be realistic because they play in different seasons, and the rules are different. Here is my dream scenario. We have a USFL and XFL conference. Each has 6 teams.
The teams we cut are the Orlando Guardians and Vegas Vipers of the XFL, and Michigan Panthers and Memphis Showboats. The league would have 12 games, playing each team in your conference 2 times, and play 2 teams in the other conference. Top 3 records from each conference advance, top team gets bye in the playoffs.
This would be somewhat similar to the AFL and NFL merger. This spring league would be incredibly massive and maybe someday, give the NFL some competition and make them change some rules and get less comfortable. I’m a huge advocate for the three point conversion, and the way the XFL does kickoffs.
Rules
In this spring football fantasy, the conjoined USFL and XFL league uses the XFL rules. It makes it different from the NFL by using different rules and making it entertaining. Distancing yourself from the NFL using new and improved rules, makes the XFL stand out. It closes the gap a little bit despite the talent disparity.
Also, I kind of like that the XFL starts so soon after the NFL, because there isn’t much competition in February for football. I would love a championship after the NBA finals if they could stretch a season out that long. then they could make their season really successful.
Talent
One thing that the league could focus on is bringing on as many star players, such as Josh Gordon, Corey Coleman, and Cody Latimer, as they can. . Hopefully they could get a few on each team, but it would be somewhat unlikely.
I dream of a All-Star player draft. Where at least at the start of the conjoined leagues, they take 24 of the most well known players that they can get, and have teams draft them in a a snake formatted, 2 round draft. Players mentioned above, as well as AJ McCarron, Phillip Lindsay, Bo Scarbrough, and others are players I would think of as stars.
Conclusion
I believe that if the leagues merged, they would average over a million viewers per game, and 2-3 million for the championship game. While there are the complications, this is the only way for them to thrive in the extensive future.