I doubt they’d have him as a team owner now.
Wasn’t he the biggest reason they fell apart last time?
Don’t know enough to answer that. I think anybody who goes up against NFL is in for it. I was referring to how toxic Trump is now, they couldn’t get any ad revenue but they would sell tickets at least.
Yeah, there would be boycotts if he were involved now.
As I recall (didn’t follow closely), he was behind the push to move the season to fall and compete directly with the NFL, long before they were ready. The results were predictable, and predicted.
Kinda like Trump steaks, Trump university, most of his hotels, etc.
Trump wanted an NFL franchise but the NFL was never going to let him into their club. He saw the USFL as his way force his way into the NFL. He forced the move to the fall along with the USFL’s anti-trust lawsuit against the NFL. The USFL lost that lawsuit and never played a down of football in the fall.
As is typical for Trump, it was all about him. He didn’t give a rat’s rear-end about the league or the other owners. Although it was never going to happen, had the NFL offered to take in Trump’s franchise he would no doubt have jumped ship and screwed over the other owners. I have said before that this was the first time I became aware of Trump. I did not think much of him then, and nothing he has done since has changed my mind.
This column by Joe Nocera of the New York Times from a few years best summarizes what Trump “accomplished” with the USFL:
You have a solid knowledge of the USFL wmj, and that’s what I appreciates about you.
(Parrot will get the reference and probably nobody else)
I was in high school when the USFL played.
Is THAT what you appreciates about me?
Ok, it just got weird.
I really encourage everybody in here to watch Letterkenny on Hulu. If you don’t like it, ill personally refund you whatever Hulu cost you.
It’s only weird if you make it weird!
More on Trump and the USFL. He was his own worst enemy.
If he hadn’t been involved, I wonder if they’d have given the NFL a decent run.
That’s a preview to what a Trump presidency would look like 35 years ago.
No, the only real hope was for a few teams to be absorbed by the NFL.
Lol
Digging up three-year-old articles from left wing rags to feed your TDS?
Very healthy.
That would have been far more than they accomplished. They got buried.
I remember that time. The NFL was never going to take in any of the USFL franchises. It had no interest in expanding and would not do so until ten years later. Still, I do remember some speculating how the NFL might take in a few franchises to get the lawsuit to go away. In the span of three years the narrative had gone from a league that was not directly competing against the NFL but rather playing during the off season to one of maybe some of its franchises getting into the NFL.
And, going on memory, at the time I thought that one franchise that might have a small chance of getting into the NFL was the Philadelphia/Baltimore Stars. That franchise had Carl Peterson as its GM and Jim Mora as its head coach and was professional all around. Not only that, it had stuck to the original USFL plan. It signed several players who had been cut from NFL franchises while avoiding bidding wars with the NFL over established NFL players. It played in all three USFL Championship games, winning two. And, when the USFL decided to move to the fall, it moved out of Philadelphia, where it would have competed directly against the NFL, to Baltimore, which the NFL had vacated one year earlier.
Their owner was Myles Tannenbaum. He was one of the original owners who signed onto the spring football plan. I remember thinking that he should just lay low and go with the flow of running his franchise then maybe the NFL might take it in. However, I remember him making a statement to the effect that he thought Trump was doing the right thing and he supported it. When he did that, I figured he had blown away any chance of the NFL taking him in.
And, on another odd note, I was in college when the USFL lost its lawsuit against the NFL. Two of my college classmates insisted that since that suit was over the NFL would then take in some of its teams. One classmate said they would take the New Jersey Generals, since they had Jim Kelly, Herschel Walker and a bunch of other stars and “were good.” I wondered how much common sense they had. The NFL had just spent a ton of money and time fighting the league in court when they could have precluded that by taking in some USFL teams. Why, after winning the lawsuit, would the NFL turn around and take them in? This same classmate told me one year later that he still did not understand why the NFL did not take in any USFL teams. At that point I figured it was hopeless to try to explain it to him.