The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [93]
In the spring and summer of 1986, Trump was the powerful owner of the New Jersey Generals in the fledgling United States Football League. He decided to take on the National Football League in several different ways. First, he spearheaded the movement for the United States Football League, which played its games in the spring, to move to a fall schedule, offering direct competition with the NFL. He then took the league on in the courts, charging that the NFL tried to illegally monopolize pro football. Interestingly, in the early 2000s, it was McMahon who tried to take on the NFL by creating the XFL as a spring league. He didn’t have any more success than Trump.
The United States Football League, for those who are too young or don’t remember, was far from a gimmicky, entertainment-based league like the XFL. Instead, it was more like the American Basketball Association (a rival pro basketball league that eventually merged its four teams into the NBA). The USFL lasted three seasons, and lost somewhere between $150 and $200 million.
The USFL started in 1982 with a plan to keep salaries and costs down. In May of that year, the League signed a network television contract with ABC and a cable television contract with ESPN (then separate entities) which guaranteed each team roughly $1.1 million per year in revenue. The USFL hired established NFL coaches like George Allen, Chuck Fairbanks, and John Ralston, and the owners settled in late August of 1982 on a $1.8 million salary cap per team, using a thirty-eight-man roster. $1.3 million was allotted to sign thirty-eight players and a ten-player developmental squad, and $500,000 was allotted to sign two “star” players that did not count against the cap.
It sounded like a solid plan then, and still does. The NFL was in labor strife, following a 1982 players strike. USFL teams sought leases to play in NFL stadiums like Soldier Field, Giants Stadium, and Veterans Stadium. In the very first spring season, average attendance for all USFL games was 24,000. It was then, in August of 1983, that Donald Trump bought the New Jersey Generals. By January, Trump was calling for his fellow USFL owners (only one of whom had made money in 1982) to switch to a fall schedule and compete directly with the big boys. In February of 1984, Michael Porter, a Harvard business professor, wrote a document called “The USFL versus the NFL” (which in hindsight could have been called, “How to Destroy the USFL”), and delivered it to sixty-five members of the NFL management council. The USFL would use this document to justify their antitrust case (unlike baseball, the NFL had no anti-trust exemption). In August, the USFL owners would agree with Trump, and announce that after the 1985 season, they would move to a fall schedule.
On October 18, 1984, the USFL filed their antitrust suit against the NFL. This was a real gamble, taking on the NFL. USFL executives were swayed by the swagger of Trump and Chicago Blitz coowner Eddie Einhorn. Michael MacCambridge′s 2004 America’s Game quotes former Philadelphia Stars and present Kansas City Chiefs General Manager Carl Peterson as saying, “They absolutely were convinced that this move would either precipitate an acquisition of some USFL teams into the NFL or we would have an antitrust case . . . because they controlled basically all the networks at the time, and that we would win hands down.”
It took from October of 1984 to July of 1986 for the case to make it through all the courts. The USFL had a lot to juggle in those two years. They had to spend a ton of money to make their product competitive (and to appease their broadcast partners). In some cases, they had to work out new stadium deals, since NFL teams would be occupying their stadiums in the fall. In short, the USFL was springing leaks all over the place.
Once the USFL folded, NFL teams signed close to 200 USFL players, including future Hall