Far too often what passes for journalism in this country consists of stale, leftover thoughts recycled from paper to paper. The Kansas City Star deserves some credit for some original reporting with their article about the United Football League. Check below for excerpts:

The draft was a real killer this year. A 60-year-old coach sits in a secluded room, surrounded only by the intense and focused faces of his two closest advisers. The draft board is a few yards away, tempting the old coach with both opportunity and blunder.

Dennis Green has made decisions in rooms like this for years. He coached the Minnesota Vikings for almost a decade and then the Arizona Cardinals for three seasons. Now he’s the head coach for one of four teams in the start-up United Football League.

Green’s San Francisco team possesses the first draft pick — who is worth not just a team’s future but perhaps the future of an entire league. Hundreds of hopeful employees, dozens of desperate players, millions of stretched-thin dollars. It all depends on this draft, the next few months and the gamble that this latest challenger to the NFL packs a new kind of punch — a kind the heavyweight champ won’t see coming.

It’s June 18. Green eyes the draft board and feels the pressure. Every decision is important. Each move is critical. Each pick is — “Dad,” Green’s 12-year-old daughter, Vanessa, yells from a few feet away. “We’re going to take this guy here.”

The coach nods, and San Francisco drafts former Western Michigan tight end Branden Ledbetter. Vanessa made the call, and Green’s wife, Marie, marked Ledbetter off the list of available players. Green says he couldn’t have done it without his daughter and wife in the draft room with him. The coach was on vacation in Wisconsin on draft day, and he wanted his family with him, lightening the mood and, heck, helping him make the tough decisions. The UFL is in its infancy, and keeping things casual saves money and dampens stress.

…

reen says the UFL’s simplicity helped lure him from retirement. And it’s more football for a nation that Green believes is hungry for at least one more helping. Fridays are for high schools, Saturdays for colleges, Sundays and Mondays for the NFL. Green thinks Thursdays were awfully boring without a football game on the calendar, and that’s when most UFL contests will be televised this fall, on the cable channel Versus. Some games will be broadcast on Wednesdays and Fridays, too.

But this has been done, hasn’t it? The upstart league against the mighty NFL — that’s a kamikaze mission for investors and a weak substitute for fans. Many have figured out the hard way that the NFL is king and leaves upstart leagues for dead on the side of the road.

Michael Oriard is a professor at Oregon State and author who has studied the NFL’s success and America’s thirst for football. He said that the UFL might attract a few fans but the league should enter its inaugural season with no delusions of causing panic at the NFL offices.

“Maybe there are these little niche markets for things like that,” Oriard said, “but the NFL is not going to be threatened in any way.

“I’m skeptical that this thing is going to be very successful. I don’t think people are hungry for more football. There’s a ton of football on. Anything that presents itself as professional football that’s demonstrably worse than the NFL, is going to be at a huge disadvantage.”

But Green says the league’s secret is its business plan and its view of itself as a minor-league system for the NFL. Green says the UFL’s decision-makers are former NFL employees, the kind of people who learned that the NFL made mistakes on its way to the top. The UFL’s leaders have no intention of repeating those lapses.

UFL commissioner Michael Huyghue, a longtime former Jacksonville Jaguars executive, says salaries are nonnegotiable — players aren’t allowed to have agents — and will be capped at $60,000 for the six-game season. Huyghue says that some of the NFL’s tallest challenges are rising salaries, which make up about 70 percent of NFL teams’ costs, and the reliance on big television contracts. That TV money then fuels players’ contract demands, creating a cycle of teams looking beyond ticket sales to pay players — to simply break even.

Huyghue says most NFL team owners make a profit only from non-NFL events at their team’s stadium. He says the NFL’s financial model, fueled by the salary cap, is a “backward system,” and the wheel keeps spinning and spinning until it veers toward losing control.

“That system is flawed,” he says. “What started as a panacea in the NFL turned into a debacle.”

…

Before joining the league, Green was spending some days on a fishing boat off the San Diego coast, others in meetings as a motivational speaker and business consultant. That was life after football for Green, and he learned a thing or two about the financial models that work. Green says the UFL’s plan is sound, and where past leagues — the USFL, XFL and the Arena Football League — failed or are failing, the UFL has primed itself to hang around.

Green says that’s all the UFL wants to do — for now. And if the NFL is somehow unable to reach a labor agreement next year — the collective-bargaining agreement between the league and players’ association is set to expire — and a much-dreaded work stoppage sets in, guess which league will still be kicking off on Thursdays. Green says he isn’t hoping for a prolonged labor disagreement. But in case there is one …

“We offer alternative football,” Green says.

The raspy-voiced coach likes to talk details when the game stokes his passion, but here’s the quick version of how UFL officials sold him: Players with high-level college talent and low-level NFL skills are given a chance, maybe a last chance, to play on the national stage.

Two players who were with the Chiefs last year, wide receiver B.J. Sams and safety Oliver Celestin, were among the 99 players drafted last month. The idea is that playing time — and being able to continue being paid to play football — will satisfy these players, who have learned that the NFL has no room for them, let alone promises of stardom and a huge contract.

[b]When the numbers were crunched, and the expansion plan was pitched — the league plans to add at least two teams in 2010, in Los Angeles and Hartford, Conn., with other locations under consideration[/b] — Green says he stopped caring about catching sea bass and began thinking about discovering the next untapped football star, the player who has everything working for him but the gift of opportunity.

“I’ve always believed in the Kurt Warners of the world,” Green says.

Huyghue says he has no delusions that NFL fans will abandon the flagship league in favor of the UFL. Instead, the commissioner says he prefers to target fans who consider a night with no televised football a wasted opportunity, a city without a football team a ghost town.

“I don’t know if the country needs more football,” he says, “but there are enough football players. This is another opportunity for the players who deserve it and for cities that have a demand for a team.”

[i]For now, anyway, Huyghue says there will be no bidding wars for NFL stars[/i] — though he said the UFL would consider giving Michael Vick a place to play and transition back into the NFL. Even if landing a famous face would place the league on the credibility superhighway, the cost, Huyghue says, would crumble the very budget the UFL has built its foundation on.

…

Training camp begins in September, and games begin three weeks later. Green says he can hardly wait to hit the computer each day to find out what’s next for America’s latest upstart football league. He says another windfall of talent will come after NFL teams begin trimming rosters next month. Green says he’s not embarrassed to collect the NFL’s rejects. In fact, the old coach says he’s living the most stress-free offseason of his life — counting only the ones during which he’s been employed and off the fishing boat, anyway.

“We’re going to get together at the beginning of September,” Green says, “start from scratch and play.

“This is not a gimmick league. If America likes high school football, they’re going to like any kind of pro football. We just want people to understand the game, know the game. People who just appreciate a touchdown.”

Source: http://www.kansascity.com/sports/v-print/story/1306125.html

It is good to see the various coaches continue to be excellent spokesmen for the league. It is also great to see a non-UFL city have an extensive feature regarding the league, hopefully that will continue over the next three months prior to kickoff.