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COLUMN: St. Louis is the center of the spring football universe
With half the UFL owned by FOX, the league is really nothing more than a television product helping football-starved fans to get through the weekend from March to June.
After all, the USFL started playing all their games in one location and expanded to four locations. It’s also no wonder that three of those four hosting spots came with the merger.
However, attendance is how the leagues are judged, especially by football standards. And outside of one team, the UFL week by week is doing arena football numbers.
This past Sunday, the Arizona Rattlers played an Indoor Football League game against the San Diego Strike Force in front of 8,716 fans at the Desert Diamond Arena, the former home of the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes in Glendale, Ariz. That’s more than two UFL games in Week 3, DC Defenders at Arlington Renegades (8,411) and Houston Roughnecks at Michigan Panthers (6,952).
Now maybe the Rattlers are just the crown jewel of indoor football. Maybe Arizona should be a market in consideration next year. But when seven of the eight UFL teams are fluctuating between slightly above and below 10,000 each week and playing in mostly empty stadiums, it is most certainly a cause for concern when it comes to the viability of spring football.
St. Louis stands out as the biggest outlier. The Battlehawks became the first modern spring football team to bring in 40,000 fans to the former home of the Rams during their home opener against Arlington on April 6, who knows how many people will pack the Dome on Saturday, April 20, when the 2-1 XFL Conference-leading Battlehawks take on the Memphis Showboats.
Last year, the Battlehawks were the only team in the XFL to have games with over 30,000 fans in attendance. They remain the one market that is thriving during the spring, and at this point, they may be the only viable market.
Battlehawks head coach Anthony Becht, who used to play for the St. Louis Rams, thinks the reason behind the fan support in St. Louis is because the city was once an NFL market and this team fills the void.
“They had a taste of the NFL,” Becht said, referencing the Cardinals leaving for Arizona and the Rams returning to Los Angeles after spending 20 years at the Dome of America’s Center. “There’s a lot of bitter fans, true fans that love the game of football. That helps because we want that back. They want to have a football team in that city.”
The success of the Battlehawks and the UFL on a macro level is to the benefit of football as a whole. UFL games are a joy to watch on television. The same networks that broadcast NFL games are on top of these games each weekend and have the freedom to maximize access to the happenings from sideline to sideline. Viewers can hear the players and coaches during the game and also hear from them during mid-game interviews with sideline reporters.
“I love the access, that’s what’s great about our league,” Becht said. “The NFL has their unique ways they do things and I think they’re watching us,” Becht said. “That’s the whole part. They’re watching our technology, they’re watching our access. They are fully immersed in what we’re doing as a league and if we can show feasible reasons why this stuff is good and it’s great for fans. I think the biggest thing access-wise is the replays and the official conversations. Those things are audiblized as well.”
There’s little reason to believe that the UFL is going to fold after this season if a team like the Showboats can’t get 20,000 into the Liberty Bowl. As a league with eight teams but one singular owner, the UFL can always shuffle the deck with other markets.
If it’s not working in Michigan, move the Panthers to a city not used to the NFL. Maybe give the West Coast a look and put teams in San Diego, Los Angeles, and somewhere in the Bay Area. Maybe the DC Defenders have the right idea and future UFL teams should play in MLS stadiums.
Or, if nothing else seems feasible, take a page from the USFL playbook and put all the games in St. Louis. If this league is mainly built to be something to watch on TV and gamble on across the Mississippi River, at least there’s one place that will guarantee gate revenue.
Either way, St. Louis is clearly the center of the spring football universe.