| 1986 USFL season | |
|---|---|
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| Duration | September 13, 1986 – January 11, 1987 |
| Date | February 1, 1987 |
| Finals venue | Gator Bowl,Jacksonville, Florida |
| Seasons | |
The1986 USFL season would have been the fourth season of theUnited States Football League. Plans and a schedule had been set for a 1986 season, which (unlike the previous three seasons, which were played in spring) would have played in the autumn and winter months, but the failure to secure a large judgment or concessions through a landmark antitrust lawsuit against theNational Football League, combined with the seizure of one of the team's assets, days before the season was to begin led the league to postpone, then ultimately cancel the season and cease operations. The federal court judgement found the NFL guilty of violating antitrust guidelines on July 29, 1986, but the USFL was only awarded $1 (eventually raised to $3.76 through automatic trebling and compound interest, though the league never claimed the money) in damages plus court costs, as the jury found that the actions of the USFL owners had done as much in detriment to themselves as did the actions of the NFL. On August 4, the 1986 season was canceled.[1] On August 7, all players were released from their contracts.[2]
A major point of uncertainty was the case of theTampa Bay Bandits. The Bandits were in ownership turmoil as the result of co-owner Stephen Arky's 1985 suicide[4] and the terminal illness of majority ownerJohn F. Bassett, who died in May 1986; even if Bassett had been well enough to continue in the league, he was an outspoken opponent of sharing a market with the NFL'sBuccaneers in the fall and had planned to pull the Bandits out of the league to start a spring circuit of his own,[5][6] which at one point—possibly due to delirium brought on by brain cancer—Bassett had proposed as a multiple-sport league.[4] Bassett had begun merger discussions with theJacksonville Bulls andOrlando Renegades (Renegades owner Donald Dizney had previously been a minority owner of the Bandits) to create a statewide Florida franchise, but Dizney rejected the proposal out of loyalty to Orlando and Bulls owner Fred Bullard was only interested if Bassett, Arky andBurt Reynolds had stayed on as investors in the merged team.[7] Eventually, the league found an ownership group willing to take Bassett's place: Lee Scarfone and Tony Cunningham agreed to field the Tampa Bay Bandits in the USFL for the fall 1986 season.[8] However, it soon became known that Scarfone and Cunningham had gone into significant debt to buy out Bassett's rights and were left bankrupt when, on August 4, 1986, a judge ordered the seizure of all of the team's assets to cover the contract ofBret Clark, a safety Bassett had signed in early 1985.[9]
Arky's suicide also threatened theBirmingham Stallions' existence. Arky's father-in-law Marvin Warner had owned the Stallions, and the sequence of events that led to Arky's suicide, the exposure of securities fraud at Arky's company ESM Government Securities, sparked abank run onHome State Savings Bank when it was revealed that most of ESM's money had been deposited in that bank, wiping out most of Warner's net worth.[10] The team's limited partners, along with a bailout from the city of Birmingham, kept the team afloat during 1985.
The loss of the Western Conference required a realignment of the league's (ostensibly) eight remaining teams. The three Florida teams would have joined Arizona as the "Independence Division", while the "Liberty Division" would comprise the four other teams.
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Three teams would have entered the 1986 season with new head coaches.
The sudden cancellation of the 1986 season left the league's coaches out of work. While players were able to sign with other teams fairly quickly, other leagues' teams had already set their coaching staffs, meaning that Pardee, Orlando'sLee Corso and Tampa Bay'sSteve Spurrier would have to wait until 1987 to find work. For Birmingham'sRollie Dotsch, it would be too late: by the time he returned to coaching as an NFL assistant in 1987, he had developed terminal cancer. Davis would find work as a consultant with the startupArena Football League in 1986 and 1987, then jumped to theWorld Indoor Football League in 1988 before that league also folded before beginning play, after which joined the NFL as an assistant later that fall. Michaels, Memphis'sPepper Rodgers and Arizona'sFrank Kush effectively ended their careers after the USFL ceased operations (Kush's personal services contract meant he would never have to work again; Rodgers would briefly return to coaching in 1995, while Michaels claimed he was blacklisted by the NFL in his efforts to find paying work afterward). Corso would move to broadcasting, beginning a long career working forESPN as a college football analyst.
Marv Levy, whose rights were still under contract to the suspended Chicago team, would find work during the 1986 season: after theBuffalo Bills firedHank Bullough (who himself had been under contract to thePittsburgh Maulers), the team hired Levy midseason. Levy would remain with the Bills for the next 12 seasons.
The1986 USFL draft was held May 6, 1986; as in 1983 and 1985, the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City hosted the draft. TheOrlando Renegades selectedMike Haight, an offensive tackle from theIowa Hawkeyes football team, as the first overall pick; Haight would instead sign with the NFL'sNew York Jets before the USFL season was postponed. The 1986 draft was complicated by the fact that a number of teams had traded draft picks to and from teams that had folded; under the draft rules for 1986, all teams, defunct or not, were included, and any draft pick that was held by a defunct team (either by trade or original award) was skipped over. (For example, the Bandits traded away their first round draft pick to the Denver Gold; as the Gold had pulled out of the league by 1986, and they held that pick, it was skipped over, even though the Bandits still existed.)
The1986 USFL territorial draft was held April 23, 1986. Nodispersal draft was conducted.
The USFL planned to play its games on Saturdays and Sunday nights,[11] with a weekly Thursday night game beginning in Week 3. The season was to last eighteen weeks, beginning Saturday, September 13, with nobye weeks. A single Tuesday night game was scheduled for October 28, with New Jersey playing at Jacksonville. The league scheduled agame for Thanksgiving Day and also planned a full slate of fourgames on Christmas, imposing on a holiday the NFL had almost completely avoided (with the exception of two playoff games in 1971) up to that point. The league avoided competing with thebowl games ofcollege football by scheduling its games for the first week of January for Friday through Sunday, January 2–4. The season would end January 11.
Five teams would have made the playoffs, with a single play-in game to be held the weekend of January 17–18, two semifinals on January 25 and 26, and the league championship on February 1; the fourth USFL Championship Game was to be hosted at theGator Bowl Stadium inJacksonville, Florida.[12]
The USFL secured a television contract extension withESPN to carry a game of the week during the regular season and the entirety of the playoffs.[11]
The league had no over-the-air national broadcast partner for the 1986 season, a condition the league blamed on NFL coercion. One of the USFL's major points of contention in its antitrust lawsuit was that the NFL had allegedly conspired with theBig Three television networks to place the NFL on all three networks, preventing any competitor from gaining a contract. The jury rejected this claim. (The league, despite lack of support from the Big Three, nevertheless would have had options. TheFox network, which would eventually rise to become thefourth major network afterbuying NFL rights in the 1990s, was launching just as the USFL had planned to move to fall. For reasons unknown—possibilities include Fox's status as a network still in its infancy and the network's desire to limit the amount of programming it carried to avoid regulations—neither the USFL nor Fox pursued a partnership with each other until 36 years later, when Fox claimed the abandoned USFL trademarks forits own USFL that launched in2022. Einhorn also had access to his ownTVS Television Network, an experienced sports syndicator; the USFL could have also relied on its local broadcast partners, many of which wereindependent stations not beholden to the NFL or Big Three, andregional sports networks to continue coverage had they chosen to do so.) Another factor in the league's inability to secure a broadcast contract in the autumn was thecourt-ordered decentralization ofcollege football telecasts; with more college football telecasts available in the mid-1980s, the USFL was facing an increasingly crowded market for televised football (part of the reason why, though ESPN andABC were by this point owned by the same company and ABC had carried games the previous three years, ABC declined to carry games in 1986; USFL games had faced declining ratings and ABC also held contracts with all of themajor college football conferences).
By 1987, the NFL and ESPN had reached an agreement to expand into the time slot that the USFL had planned to use, whenESPN Sunday Night Football debuted.
