USFL wins with football and fun, not politics

Case Cookus, Philadelphia Stars quarterback, and Bart Andrus, Philadelphia Stars coach, discuss the upcoming USFL championship game.

On Sunday the Philadelphia Stars will play for the USFL championship just as they did over 30 years ago (though then representing Baltimore) in the last season finale of the doomed 1980s version of the league. They will take on the Birmingham Stallions to cap the inaugural season of this second version of the USFL.

New sports leagues are risky endeavors, but the USFL has had some good success, owing in no small part to the fact that it has strictly avoided politics and the culture wars.

Fox executive Mike Mulvihill said of the USFL experiment, "All we wanted to do is demonstrate that spring football can do viewership at the levels of Premier League, NHL regular season, Formula One or MLS. … We want to show we belong in that category, and I think that happened." A big part of the recipe for the ratings was that the USFL was truly football for football’s sake. And in sports these days, that is much rarer than it should be. Fox has renewed coverage for next year.

In just the past few years we have see Major League Baseball remove the All Star Game from Georgia over a voting bill that wound up leading to record turnout, we saw Black Lives Matter logos emblazoned on NBA courts, ESPN, once the home of sports, now often resembles left wing cable news with a few scores scrolling by occasionally.

USFL SCORES BIG WITH VIEWERS IN INAUGURAL SEASON

But by the time the USFL kicked off this Spring there had already been a backlash brewing against the non-stop politicking in professional sports. It might have been tempting two years ago for the nascent league to try to make a social justice splash, but