The USFL’s regular season has ended. It’s time to compare viewership from the second season of the four-letter spring league with the return of the XFL for first time since 2020.
Via Anthony Crupi of Sportico.com, the two leagues “finished in a dead heat .”
Per the report, the XFL averaged 602,073 viewers per game, and the USFL averaged 604,175 per game.
The USFL still has its postseason, with two games this weekend followed by the championship game.
It’s not great, but it’s not horrible, either. The question becomes the ratings that the networks televising the games would have generated with other (cheaper) programming.
Can both of these leagues survive? Either? Neither? A merger would make a lot of sense, expanding the USXFL or UXFL (or SUXFL) to 16 teams and creating a greater sense of competition for supremacy.
The NFL is the pinnacle of pro football. Everything else pales in comparison. Which explains why every other effort at an alternate league, including the one the NFL kept going for nearly a generation, eventually fails.
Maybe it will be different with the XFL and/or the USFL. Maybe legalized gambling will make people more interested in betting on, and in turn watching, the games. Maybe real-time micro-betting will become the hook.
It will take time and money to find out whether that’s the case. Meanwhile, there’s a wide-open path for in-season Tuesday night and Wednesday night football, if one of these alternate leagues ever decide to fish where the fish are.
Then again, if the XFL or USFL or Some-Other-F-L ever tries to squat on Tuesday night or Wednesday night during football season, the big fish that is Big Shield will start flopping around in that pond, pronto.