The UFL is in its first season, and if you ask professional sports handicapper Steve Fezzik, it won't have many more to come.
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Fezzik held nothing back when sharing his feelings on the startup spring league, which was formed in December after a merger of the old XFL and USFL.
Fezzik may be on to something — as not one of these spring leagues has survived. This one won't either, he insisted on the Ross Tucker Football Podcast, via Awful Announcing.
"The league is going to fail. I say that emphatically and I have the reason, Ross," Fezzik said. "We all watch football, we're creatures of habit. So we watch football all year long and then the Super Bowl comes along. And then we're like 'Where's my football? It's Saturday, it's Sunday, the weather's terrible outside, nothing's going on, the NBA games don't mean anything, there's no tournament going on in college basketball, I need my football.'
"So it's the perfect time, mid-February, to launch a spring football league when it's still wintertime. You make it regional, you make it teams in Texas and the Southeast. Great. That works."
But thanks to the late agreement on a merger, the UFL launched in March.
"But you know what doesn't work? Launching during mid-to-late March," Fezzik said. "March Madness. Baseball starting. NBA and NHL playoffs right around the corner. We have limited bandwidth. We can't handle it and we've already gone five or six weeks without watching our football on Saturday or Sunday, so we're not inclined. We're not, like, 'Hey, it's 10 a.m., it's noon on Sunday, I wanna watch my football game.
"And I think because of that, people moved on. They moved on to other sports and I think you've got to capture that audience with good stories in February, and if you don't do that by mid-March, you're done-zo and there's too many other sports going on."
Per Awful Announcing, the UFL's opening-weekend ratings "were better than the XFL's and USFL's a year ago but down from both league's debut seasons. The Week 2 average ratings dipped from 1.09 million to 842,000, which is still better than their predecessor's numbers last year."
In other words, time will tell whether this league will make it beyond this season. Fezzik seems to think that, even if it does, the UFL's days are numbered regardless.
