Book Review: Football for a Buck

Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL by Jeff Pearlman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After ESPN's fantastic 30 for 30 documentary, I think the time is right for USFL nostalgia.

I grew up with it, but it always ran second to the NFL. Still, it was a big deal.

A spring football league is a plan that someone consistently tries to attempt. The Arena Football League had a 20 year run before folding. Various indoor and outdoor leagues- even ambitious one like the AAF and two versions of the XFL have fallen short.

I suspect the rosters of the NFL and Canadian Football League are just so large that you can't staff a third competitive league.

But the USFL came close.

I find Jeff Pearlman a bit on the sensationalist side, but he is the right choice for the book. Everything about the USFL is sensationalist.

How do you fill a third league rosters? Well, you have the troublemakers that the NFL and CFL don't want. This being the 80s, that's a lot of drug users.

You also have players that are 3-5 years past their prime.

Another possibility is to throw ridiculous amounts of money at good players.

The USFL did all of the above.

They also pulled a coup in that the NFL eligibility rules at the time required players to complete four years of college. The USFL was able to steal the very talented Herschel Walker as a junior.

The USFL would be able to sign three consecutive Heisman Trophy winners, along with a few disgruntled NFLers and talented Draft Picks.

In Steve Young, they got a future Hall of Famer, of course, the kind of money they paid him, he should be bulletproof.

Doug Flutie was too short to play in the NFL many said, but that didn't stop him from getting a huge USFL contract (for which he was going to play for Donald Trump's team, and Trump was going to make the USFL pay for him. Hmmmm...)

The story of the USFL has been distilled down to the battle between Tampa Bay Bandits owner John Bassett and New Jersey Generals owner Trump.

The truth is there were some really good owners and coaches and some really bad counterparts (LA Bandits owner J. William Oldenberg was a huckster who could probably not be trusted with running a high school team).

The initial plan to be Conservative and grow slow was a really good roadmap. Owners who kept their expenses down and ran their team like a minor league team- community involvement, fun fan friendly events- generally succeeded.

Of course, the instant success and potential of bigger success was too much temptation.

At the end of the day, Trump's motivation had been to get a NFL team in the New York area (something commissioner Pete Rozelle would never go for). He forced the owners into moving the League to the Fall despite Bassett's (and others) objections.

This matter-of-factly killed the league. It wasn't that the League wasn't successful. However, some of the very successful franchises were in places like Denver, Michigan, and Philadelphia, and quite frankly, were never going to be able to compete in the hearts of fans with the likes of the Broncos, Lions, and Eagles.

Trump played both sides to get things done. He would tell the media that the owners were interested in moving the league to the Fall (whether they were or not) and have them report that as fact, and then use this media coverage to persuade the owners that the momentum to move to a Fall League was there.

The last grasp of the USFL was the famous anti-Trust case against the NFL (and the evidence was there), which famously the USFL won, and were awarded settlement damages of $1 (actually $3 and court costs, but that's not nearly as funny).

The court case may have made a difference if it was David (USFL) vs Goliath (NFL) but even that couldn't go smoothly, as Trump and his legal team (including Roy Cohn) decided to make it the less empathetic Trump vs the NFL.

This is a real fun book. It's filled with sex and drugs and those kind of 1980s stories that your kids might not be ready for, but it's good. You don't necessarily have to be a sports fan to enjoy it.

There are so many outrageous stories that you can't help but think it would make a good movie, but it would be unbelievable.

Readers will probably come to it with all kinds of expectations, but this should fill most. It does a good job telling the story of the league and the stories on the field and off. It's a fairly breezy book, but it has a lot of meat to it as well.



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