Are You Ready For Some Football? Really?

I'm old enough to remember the Denver Gold, but I'm also young enough that I can't forget them. The Denver Gold was Colorado's USFL team. Between the years of 1983 and 1985, they were our only football outlet, after the "real" football was over. This was the league that gave Jim Kelly, Steve Young, and Herschel Walker their starts. There were truckloads of money dumped on this Spring Football idea, but it never quite caught on. For a year or so, though, I learned to care about Larry Canada, a running back for the Gold. His nickname was "The Mailman," because, we were told, "he delivers."
Fifteen years passed, and at the turn of the century, paying little or no heed to the lessons of the USFL, World Wrestling promoter Jim McMahon launched the XFL. The new "extreme" brand of football came with no particular rooting interest for me, and so I watched a couple of games purely for the visceral impact of the potentially dangerous rule changes. And then there was "He Hate Me," remembered more for his jersey than his accomplishments on the field. That's the kind of show they were running.
Now we are told, as our economy is about to collapse on itself, that a new league is forming. The United Football League will try once again to fill that outdoor football need that all red-blooded Americans feel. In September. Their mission statement reads, in part, "To fulfill the unmet needs of football fans in major markets currently underserved by professional football by providing a high quality traditional football league comprised of world class professional football players." An interesting notion, considering one of their teams will be headquartered in San Francisco. When they say "underserved," maybe they mean quality more than quantity, since there are already two professional football teams that call the Bay Area home. They're promising to kick off in October 2009. Maybe they'll get Larry Canada out of retirement, since they know that he can deliver.