With first UFL season finished, will it return?

United Football League commissioner Michael Huyghue shouted "We'll see you next year" to the fans as he handed his championship trophy to coach Marty Schottenheimer at the Virginia Beach Sportsplex on Friday night.

But will Marty and the Destroyers really see us in 2012? If there's one thing the local UFL experience has taught us, it is believe it when it happens.

"There's a lot of things we can do to try to take advantage of the momentum from winning the championship," said John Castleberry, the Destroyers VP of sales and marketing, who said callers already rang up his office Monday asking about next season's tickets.

"The league tells us we're moving forward. OK, tell us how we're moving forward."

"How" has always been a wildcard with this wildcat football league that gets along, in the literary sense, on a shoeshine and a smile. (Others have been "when" and "why.")

Losses for its investors are reputedly well over $100 million since its start-up three years ago. It still has little hope for TV revenue or a financial relationship with the NFL as a developmental platform.

As much sense as the latternotion makes to UFL minds, the NFL seems to be humming along fine with college football as its minor leagues. So, just asking a question, why would The League start propping up the UFL now?

But Huyghue told the Las Vegas Journal-Review last week the UFL, which aborted its full schedule this year to save money, will lose only $20 million or so this time around.

And Destroyers owner Bill Mayer, who started writing checks for Virginia when his Hartford franchise folded, speaks of meticulous future budgets - based on zero TV money - that accept "sustainable losses" as the price of fielding a product that's wowed local fans.

As usual, then, in the Unreliable Football League, we wait for shoes to drop.

As Mayer emphasized in an interview last week, expansion, i.e. new money, is the thumbs-up, thumbs-down survival issue. Without it, the UFL will join the WFL, USFL and others in the graveyard of pro football leagues.

"Eight would be a good number, but we can get by with six," Bill Hambrecht, the UFL founder and Las Vegas team owner, told the Vegas paper. "If we're going to be taken seriously, we have to have more than four teams."

Hambrecht's Locomotives get dangerously sparse support, though, compared with the strong bases in Virginia Beach, Omaha and Sacramento, which means getting to six teams probably will mean hitting three new markets.

We know of one, Salt Lake City. Hambrecht has said he'll move his team there if he doesn't stick it out in Las Vegas. Others on the UFL's immediate radar are Chattanooga, Tenn., Jackson, Miss., Des Moines, Iowa and Portland, Ore.

Now, to close new deals.

"There's no reason we can't take what they did last year in Omaha and this year in Virginia into other markets this size and try to sell it," Castleberry said.

"We're here now trying to think of what to do, how to take advantage of this. But until we get some direction we can't do it."

OK. So how does "take the next couple of months off" sound?

"We're looking at making a decision sometime in January," Huyghue said.

Which means "We'll see you next year" really just means, "We'll see."

Tom Robinson, (757) 446-2518, tom.robinson@pilotonline.com

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