The league opened its second season in East Hartford as the Hartford Colonials rolled to a 27-10 victory over the visiting Sacramento Mountain Lions.
The UFL is in the second year of its existence and Saturday kicked off the second year of a multiyear experiment. It’s an experiment that struggled to gain notoriety in its inaugural season. But if the UFL can weather the storm initially, smoother waters may be ahead. Waters that could eventually lead the league toward a marquee brand of American professional football.
That’s because the widely publicized labor dispute in the NFL continues to rage on with no end in sight.
Look no further than the NFL’s opening weekend and the gestures of players showing their solidarity by raising one finger to represent they are one as a union for a potential labor battle.
So what the UFL is attempt to do is capitalize on that. If the NFL does go through a lockout — which many, including some close to negotiations, believe is increasingly possible — the UFL will be there with open arms, ready to catch football fans desperate for more pigskin.
Not only would the UFL offer fans a chance for professional football in the fall, but it also would offer NFL players a chance to earn a paycheck while they are being locked out by the NFL.
If the UFL continues its season in the fashion it opened it, the league might be in luck.
The brand of football on Saturday was good. College football is wildly popular in America, but at the end of the day, the UFL is already littered with players that were stars in college.
There is no questioning the fact that the actual brand of football is better than what you’ll find in the other games on Saturday taking place on campuses across the country.
The UFL is not on the same level as the NFL, of course, but it’s showing that it won’t take much for them to get there.
“As far as the level of play, it’s pro football,” Sacramento quarterback and former NFL player Daunte Culpepper said. “No matter where you’re playing, if it’s pro, it’s a serious game.”
Hartford quarterback Josh McCown, who also spent time in the NFL, agrees.
“The level of play was great,” McCown said of the Colonials’ opening win over the Mountain Lions. “Their defense was flying around out there.”
The speed of the game is one place where the NFL and UFL should vary drastically, but most players said that the speed of the game is much higher than the college game while backing up what both Culpepper and McCown said.
“You see some grown men out there across the ball,” said Colonial running back and former UConn product Andre Dixon. “The speed of the game is a little bit faster [than college], but there’s still guys out there being physical and making plays.
At the end of the day, perhaps the biggest thing the UFL has going for it is that it’s still professional football. And as 14,384 people proved on Saturday afternoon at Rentschler Field, fans will come out for good football.
“It was a great atmosphere,” Culpepper said. “People love football, and people love to be here, and I just think it’s going to grow.”
Dennis Green, who has seen a lot of success coaching at the NFL level in the past, knows a thing or two about a good football product, and he insisted after the game that there is something to be excited for with the UFL.
“I think it was a very good atmosphere for football,” he said, adding that the mood was “festive” on Saturday.
The key for the UFL is sustaining the momentum.
“It was definitely, definitely something special today, without a doubt,” Dixon added.
The UFL presents opportunities for the taking, and they aren’t just for players like Dixon who are using the league as a stepping-stone to the NFL. The UFL itself has an opportunity to be a viable professional football alternative to pigskin on Sundays. This isn’t the USFL or XFL.
The NFL can’t get caught up worrying about the UFL, though. The NFL must take care of its own problems first, and for the time being, the UFL isn’t at the top of the list. But that might not last too long.
With labor troubles on the horizon, the NFL already hears the quiet footsteps of the UFL. If the second season of the young league follows the trend set by the 2010 campaign’s first contest, those quiet footsteps the NFL is hearing just may start resembling a loud stomping.
