Former Tider Jerome Ford and Da Blitz bombed the Sloth Monsters on The Third Sunday in October

The World Football League (WFL) changed the face of professional football back in 1974

The shoulda, coulda, woulda WFL of 1974

BIRMINGHAM, AL - For one moment, image if the World Football League (WFL) had originally picked these twelve (12) U.S. markets in 1974; Seattle, Indianapolis, Tampa/St. Petersburg, Phoenix, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Tennessee (Memphis or Nashville), Las Vegas, San Antonio, Los Angeles, New Jersey/New York and Birmingham. And if so, do you think the league would have been more successful? My guess is yes, because to be successful in upstart professional football, you need to go to markets that the NFL has ignored. The American Football League (AFL) provided a solid blueprint in the 1960s when they went to Kansas City, Denver, Buffalo, Boston, Houston, Oakland, San Diego, and later to Cincinnati and Miami with tons of success and very little franchise movement. The WFL on the other hand, started with twelve (12) original teams pitted for Boston, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Southern California, Houston, Hawaii, Portland, Jacksonville, Toronto and Birmingham. Mostly, a suicidal list of NFL markets. The league was indecisive from the beginning like they really didn't have strategy for success, or for long-term growth. Cases in point, the Boston club ended up in New York before the 1974 season and eventually landed in Charlotte. The Washington franchise moved to Florida before the 1974 season began and played the shortened 1975 season in San Antonio. The Houston Texans settled for Shreveport and Toronto had to move to Memphis prior to the 1974 season because of a Canadian government ban on foreign football leagues. For a historical perspective, when the WFL was still in formation in April of 1974, the NFL announced expansion plans to Tampa Bay and Seattle beginning with the 1976 season, in an effort to combat the fledgling league. This was in direct retaliation to the new league since the WFL was in the process of picking markets and signing, and attempting to sign, so many good NFL players to jump to the new league. The WFL had already escalated the payroll of the average NFL club by 50 percent. The NFL was basically forced into the 1976 expansion similar to what happened in the 1960s when the AFL forced NFL expansion to Dallas, Minnesota, New Orleans, Atlanta, etc. According to the New York Times in June of 1974, Memphis and Phoenix were the other prime candidates for NFL expansion in 1976 with Honolulu as an outsider. With the WFL already organizing to play in Memphis and Honolulu beginning in 1974, had the NFL moved to either one of these markets, it would have risked an antitrust lawsuit from the new league. After expansion to Tampa Bay and Seattle in 1976, the NFL would not expand again for 21 years until 1995 when they awarded franchises to Jacksonville and Charlotte (these markets sound familiar) to get to 30 teams. The Raiders left Oakland for the first time in 1982 for Los Angeles and again in 2020 for Las Vegas to mark two markets off of the WFL's shoulda, coulda, woulda list from 1974. The Colts moved to Indigenapolis in the dark of night to get out of Baltimore in 1984 and the Cardinals left St. Louis for Phoenix in 1988. The Oilers would leave Houston for Tennessee in 1997, first playing one season in Memphis (1997) and then finding a more permanent home in Nashville as the Titans in 1998. The NFL would eventually award two more expansion franchises to Cleveland and Houston in 1999 to make up for a couple of mistakes for not expanding fast enough to Indigenapolis and Tennessee. To bring it full circle the 1999 Houston NFL expansion franchise chose the WFL's original team name to become the latest version of the Houston Texans. Birmingham, Memphis and San Antonio have yet to get a real shot at the NFL, but my guess that they would be just as successful as any of the other teams, most notably their peer markets of Nashville, Jacksonville and Charlotte. In closing we'll conclude, that if the WFL had followed the AFL's blueprint of going to non-NFL markets, the WFL would have lasted approximately 10 years, forced a merger and we'd probably now have a 40-team NFL today instead of a 32-team league. The eight (8) additional markets that could have kept their NFL team, or eventually been awarded an NFL expansion club, in our estimation would have been St. Louis, Oakland/Sacramento, San Diego, San Antonio, Orlando, Portland, Salt Lake City and Birmingham.

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