UFL owner: canceling games ensures league's future

The financially ailing United Football League, which is accustomed to calling audibles, will abbreviate its troubled third season to save $3.5 million, which the league’s local owner said will help ensure the UFL a fourth season.

“It’s a practical business decision,” Bill Mayer, the New York investment banker who funds the UFL’s Virginia Destroyers, said Monday. “There have been hours of discussion about this over the past week. We’re doing what’s the most realistic and most prudent thing to do.”

The UFL, which fields just four teams, will cancel three scheduled games – two of which were to involve the Destroyers – and proceed to a championship game Friday night at the Virginia Beach Sportsplex.

That contest will feature the Destroyers and two-time champion Las Vegas Locomotives, based on their 3-1 records so far. In a statement, the UFL said the contest will be at the Sportsplex based on demonstrated fan support of 12,000-plus on two previous dates there.

Sacramento has also agreed to play at Omaha in a so-called consolation game Friday night. Those teams are 1-3.

So will end a year in which the UFL considered folding before it suspended operations of Mayer’s Hartford, Conn., franchise, transferred Orlando’s roster to Virginia and aborted its planned August start once the NFL lockout was settled.

UFL commissioner Michael Huyghue has pegged the debt-riddled league’s two-year losses at more than $100 million.

Still, Mayer said the $3.5 million savings that will come largely in payroll and worker’s compensation expenses will go toward correcting what he called the UFL’s “sins of the past” and producing a “clean sheet.”

Most players make $5,000 a game; the league will not disclose salaries of coaches. Destroyers players, then, evidently will lose out on $10,000 apiece they were counting on earning for two more games.

In a text message, UFL spokesman Michael Preston said the league has yet to announce whether there will be winner and loser cash bonuses for the championship game.

Aaron Rouse, a Virginia Beach resident who plays safety for the Destroyers, said there were “a lot of legitimate concerns about the money aspect” expressed in a team meeting Monday morning.

Rouse, however, said he knew of no players who were threatening not to play, and that he urged his teammates at the meeting to “let the money work itself out and go out and win a championship. We need to have faith that the league is gonna do right by the players.

“We’ve put too much time into this to walk away from it now, so close to a championship. We want to be champions. And more than anything, the fans who have been with us from day one deserve it.”

Mayer insisted this third championship game would not be the UFL’s final one. But he said even without a television contract and a financial link to the NFL – Omaha head coach Joe Moglia has called the latter essential for the league’s survival – adding two teams must be a priority for the UFL.

“We have to be at a bare minimum of six teams; four is not sustainable,” Mayer said. “The other thing is getting the business model tweaked, but adding two franchises is absolutely critical.”

To lure new investors and locales, Mayer said the UFL will use team-controlled budgets that show paths to viability, if not profitability, without TV money and will highlight a proven product that has sent dozens of players to NFL rosters.

“I don’t think there’s a soul in the league that would’ve liked to have seen it at this point,” Destroyers head coach Marty Schottenheimer said. “I’m not privy to all information, but as I understand it the objective is to move forward so that we can reconcile the economics of this and make it work.”

The sixth-winningest coach in NFL history, Schottenheimer said he did not regret signing on with the UFL and that he would “absolutely” like to return.

“I’ve had a ball,” said Schottenheimer, 68. “I steadfastly believe this will move forward. It doesn’t do you any good to say ‘Oh, woe is me.’ You’ve got to go find solutions to problems in life.”

Tom Robinson, (757) 446-2518 tom.robinson@pilotonline.com HamptonRoads.com/robinson Twitter @RobinsonVP