In America, football remains its most popular sport, and the Super Bowl is the most-watched sporting event of the year. While those that have NFL franchises and the fans that watch the sport are seemingly dedicated to the NFL, it is somewhat surprising that each recent attempt by an outside football sports league to make inroads upon the NFL has all gone down relatively easily to defeat, despite in many a case, achieving sports network coverage and the critical revenues that this so brings to that respective upstart league.
Presently, the latest attempt to engage fans into watching football is the United Football League (UFL) which has smartly structured its season to run in the springtime, after the NFL season is over, and pretty much after “March Madness” has ended. While there are always going to be other sports leagues, such as MLB, NBA, and the NHL to attract viewers, the one thing that the UFL has going for it, is the fact that it clearly does not compete against the NFL through the same seasonal dates, which thus provides those most interested in football, with an alternative league for them to turn their attention to. That said,
it would seem that what the UFL should not do, is attempt to essentially be a “NFL light’, in which the rules of the game are in essence, a copy of the NFL. Instead, it would behoove the UFL to communicate with their fans to see what they do like and what they do not like when it comes to the NFL, and then to concentrate their attention on trying to provide the changes that would be most pleasing to that audience, in which, the game would be familiar enough to those fans, but also different and innovative enough that changes so made to UFL rules would intrigue and interest those same fans.
The biggest change that the UFL should consider is getting rid of four downs to make ten yards in order to achieve a first down and replacing such with just three downs to make ten yards to achieve a first down. This, quite obviously, would reduce running plays and would increase passing plays. This would also mean that instead of one team seemingly having the ball for an incredibly long period of time, and thus literally running down the game clock, that the turnover of the ball from one team to the other, because of their failure to get a first down, would make the game not only to be more fast-paced, but advantageous for a team that is behind so that they could conceivably catch up. The other big change would be to provide more points to a team that scores a touchdown, from more than 25 years away from the goal line, so that in doing so, this would be an eight-point touchdown, instead of just six. Again, this would change the strategy for those teams trying to catch up, and would therefore make the game more exciting to know that instead of possibly needing two scores to tie or take the lead, that it could conceivably be done with just one score.
Whether or not the UFL cares to carefully curate their rules and amend such is up to the management of the league, but simply trying to be a copycat of the NFL, seems to lack both innovation and imagination, thereby signifying that those that understand that risk has its place, ought to risk more to gain more.