Start date January 17, 1987 | Date 1 February 1987 | |
Duration September 13, 1986 – January 11, 1987 Site Gator Bowl, Jacksonville, FL Similar 1984 NFL season, 1986 NFL season, 1983 NFL season | ||
The 1986–87 USFL season would have been the fourth season of the United 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 the National 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.
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Franchise changes
A major point of uncertainty was the case of the Tampa Bay Bandits. The Bandits were in ownership turmoil as the result of co-owner Stephen Arky's 1985 suicide and the terminal illness of majority owner John F. Bassett; even if Bassett had been well enough to continue in the league, he was an outspoken opponent of sharing a market with the NFL's Buccaneers in the fall and had planned to pull the Bandits out of the league to start a spring circuit of his own. 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. 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 of Bret Clark, a safety Bassett had signed in early 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.
Head coach changes
Three teams would have entered the 1986 season with new head coaches.
Draft
The 1986 USFL Draft was held May 6, 1986; as in 1983 and 1985, the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City hosted the draft. The Orlando Renegades selected Mike Haight, an offensive tackle from the Iowa Hawkeyes football team, as the first overall pick; Haight would instead sign with the NFL's New 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.)
No dispersal draft or territorial draft was held for 1986.
Season structure
The USFL planned to play its games on Saturdays and Sunday nights, with a weekly Thursday night game beginning in Week 3. The season was to last eighteen weeks, beginning Saturday, September 13, with no bye weeks. A single Tuesday night game was scheduled for October 28, with New Jersey playing at Jacksonville. The league scheduled a game for Thanksgiving Day and also planned a full slate of four games 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 the bowl games of college 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 the Gator Bowl Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida.
Broadcasting
The USFL secured a television contract extension with ESPN to carry a game of the week during the regular season and the entirety of the playoffs.
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 point of contention in its antitrust lawsuit was that the NFL had allegedly conspired with the Big 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. The Fox network, which would eventually rise to become the fourth major network after buying 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. Einhorn also had access to his own TVS Television Network, an experienced sports syndicator; the USFL could have also relied on its local broadcast partners, many of which were independent stations not beholden to the NFL or Big Three, and regional sports networks to continue coverage had they chosen to do so.)
By 1987, the NFL and ESPN had reached an agreement to expand into the time slot that the USFL had planned to use, when ESPN Sunday Night Football debuted.