The Perfect Union

According to Peter King over at SI, Mark Cuban's fledgling football league (because, in between winning nothing with the Mavs, trying to buy the Cubs so he can entice another franchise with false hopes and bombast, and messing around with Yahoo's board to see who can bring in the least amount of shareholder value) is thinking hard about...

drum roll please...

Michael Vick!

Now, Lord knows, there will be more professional football in your life at some point. The simple fact is that every year, the public grows less and less tolerant of the eight months of dead time that the NFL makes its fan base endure. It is not the #1 sport in the US; it is the number one through three sports in the US. MLB and NBA are not rivals; they are sideshows. The country begins and ends with football.

The UFL may or may not be the league that breaks through, though, to be honest, I'm not seeing it. Friday Night Football is a fine thing for high school, but it's kind of a dead zone for actual television viewing... and that's the night that the league is supposed to play. During the fall is the best time of the year to be a sports fan, between the MLB playoffs, the NFL regular season, the start of the NHL and NBA seasons, and the sheer rush that is Q3 / Q4 and the holidays. That's also when they are planning to play.

Needless to say, this is Big Stupid on many, many levels.

A winter / spring league, in domes and warm-weather cities, would work... provided it was domestic, didn't have dippy rules a la Arena Ball,with the rules tweaked for offense to make sure that unwatchable football doesn't happen. Sprinkle in some reasonable name coaches, a few decent names (either washed-up vets that are local to their teams, maybe some good local college players), and make sure the refs are good. Finally, relax some of the nonsense rules that people hate the NFL for imposing, make it supremely tailgate friendly, cap the salaries and don't expect to make money for five to ten years... and you may have something. Given that the Cube isn't about patience or sense, it's not going to happen that way with this league, but it eventually will.

Meanwhile, Vick. Good grief. If the league is to be paid for with sports blog hits, they'll do fine. Otherwise, not so much...