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The Tampa Bay Rays baseball team has become the latest benefactors of the United Football League. While the new league spent the past week unveiling team names and uniform color schemes, the announcement of the pending Rays ownership of the Florida Tuskers was the only real surprise.
While no one truly knows the future of this league so far the news doesn’t look all that promising. First of all the team names really leave something to be desired. The Florida Tuskers, New York Sentinels, Las Vegas Locomotives, and California Redwoods all fall short of names that inspire thoughts of football.
On top of that the uninspired uniforms this league rolled out over the past week are all misses both with football fans, and casual fans of fashion. All four team feature a color of the UFL logo as the basis for the scheme. The Redwoods have the UFL green as their main color, while the Locomotives have silver, and the Tuskers have blue. The Sentinels feature a black uniform with green highlights and is by far the best of the four.
Based on the players already signed to this league this is going to be a leauge of players undrafted by the NFL, those who couldn’t cut it in the NFL, and various others going up or down in the respective football careers. While that may be a strong selling point for the new league, the lack of engaging uniforms is a major negative.
Since the league is now backed by the Rays, Paul Pelosi (husband of Nancy Pelosi the current Speaker of the House), William Mayer a major New York investment banker, and by Tim Armstrong Chairman and CEO of AOL none of these concerns may matter.
Since this league’s games will be aired on Versus, a cable channel owned by Comcast Cable, and HDNET a channel owned by one Mark Cuban, it seems likely that the UFL will make it past year one. How mush farther is yet to be determined. This league has the right business formula so far, big money backing it and a TV contract.
With all of that being said ownership in this league could be a benefit from the Rays and the league. Now that the Rays are onboard one of the UFL games will be played at Tropicana Field. This gives the UFL a non NFL exclusive stadium, and the Rays get another tenant past baseball season to help square the bills.
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