The NFL Should Buy the XFL and USFL to Make Them Developmental Leagues

MMQB writers and editors are offering up their bad takes this week, so let’s encourage the NFL to lose a little money for the good of the game.

Welcome to Bad Takes Week, where MMQB staffers have been asked to expand upon some of their worst football takes. Keep an eye out for more of these throughout the week, and every story is posted here.

The NFL’s had a free farm system forever—and college football’s been so good to pro football in so many ways that there’s no way owners could ever repay those at that level of the sport (not that this set of billionaires would ever want to) for all they’ve done.

College ball develops players from teenagers with oversized frames and athletic potential into readymade prospects at no cost to the pros. They put them on big stages. They give the league recognizable, marketable stars who fuel not just the draft cycle, but even the worst teams’ abilities to generate optimism during a time of year when nothing’s happening. More recently, there’s been schematic and team-building innovation that’s trickled up, too.

And because of that, the NFL should never bite the hand that feeds it.

But the time has come for the league to have its own farm system and, right here, right now, in 2023, there’s a golden opportunity out there for Park Avenue to get that done.

It’s Bad Takes Week at The MMQB and, as is the case with all these pieces, the author here (me) thinks their bad take is actually a good take. So I’ll lay it right out for everyone—the NFL should buy the USFL and XFL and turn those leagues into farm systems for the pros.

Congrats, The Rock, your league is moving to Europe :: Raymond Carlin III/USA TODAY Sports

At this point, you may be thinking, Breer, that’s terrible—and you’re cheating. That actually is a good take. I know it is. But there’s no way NFL owners, or the commissioner, think it is, which opens the door for me to slide this good take through the Bad Takes Week mail slot, and walk away clean.

How do I know that? Well, owners already showed us, back when they disbanded NFL Europe in 2007. They didn’t, mind you, shutter the league because it wasn’t effective. They shuttered it, predictability, because it wasn’t profitable. And with the makeup of ownership shifting back then, to bigger-money, more business-minded billionaires, and a new commissioner in, with a mandate to get the league to $25 billion in annual revenue, anything that wasn’t maximizing the bottom line wasn’t going to fly.

It happened even though the league had become a breeding ground for players, coaches and even broadcasters. No fewer than three Super Bowl quarterbacks—Kurt Warner, Brad Johnson and Jake Delhomme—were developed through its ranks. The sport’s popularity in Germany exploded, and that growth was sustained, evident both in the players coming from there (Sebastian Vollmer, Björn Werner) and the game the league staged there last year.

So, no, my plan won’t work for the NFL, for the same reason NFL Europe didn’t. But that doesn’t mean the league shouldn’t go forward with it.

The benefits, I think, would be undeniable.

And that brings me to how I’d set the whole thing up. I’d keep the USFL stateside, and move the XFL to Europe. I’d have maybe six teams in both, and have the champions of each play a mini Super Bowl in the spring. I’d keep XFL chief Dwayne Johnson on to captain the effort in Europe, in large part because I think his star power would resonate over there.

I’d allow teams to allocate players they wanted developed to these leagues—and to be fair to all, I’d rotate by year where each conference’s players would be allocated (so one year AFC players would go to Europe for the XFL, the next they’d stay in the U.S. and play in the USFL).

One big question to answer would be whether to mirror the NFL rule that players can’t enter the pros until three years after their high school class graduates. I could go either way with that. In many cases, now, NIL makes it so college football would be more lucrative for the biggest stars anyway. Another question might be whether this would be voluntary, and I think the answer to that would be yes, that players would have to sign off on being allocated (my sense is, with the financial and developmental benefits, most guys on the NFL’s fringes would go).

The benefits would be obvious. Because of strict rules limiting team-mandated offseason work for NFL players, it’s become harder for teams to build depth and bring along younger players who aren’t playing on gameday, particularly on the lines of scrimmage (where not being able to hit in practice is an issue in developing guys). This plan would help solve that in getting guys who aren’t getting the reps they need with their NFL teams the extra work.

While that’s happening, it’d also allow another pipeline for young coaches to develop skills as position coaches or play-callers, or even head coaches. And because the NFL would be controlling it, there could be efforts to cover areas (like diversity) where the league has had trouble in the area of coaching.

Then, there’s the fact that you’d be, again, in Europe. It wouldn’t be the easiest thing to draw people to the games, just as that was a challenge for NFL Europe. But the league could work creatively to turn these games into festivals for the sport, where the action on the field is just part of an entry point to get kids watching or even playing (which, to me, should be the ultimate goal, because kids who play usually grow up to become avid viewers).

And if you’re really hung up on turning a profit, it seems to me like it’d be pretty easy to create a lot of cool content—imagine reality shows spotlighting a bunch of aspiring kids from the Midwest and South dropped into Paris—that would help grow the game at home and abroad, as well.

I’ll stop now, because the more I think about it, the more I think this take doesn’t belong in Bad Takes Week.

But my one from 2019 didn’t really either. So then, maybe everyone can just concede that, and we can get some USFL games played in my brand-new, federally funded megastadium in New Orleans.