In the 1990s heyday of the NBA, as the Chicago Bulls won six titles, Michael Jordan became the most famous athlete on earth and basketball spread to the far corners of the globe, a dozen executives gathered every week in Midtown Manhattan over sandwiches to discuss how they could take advantage of the sport’s ascendance.
The lunch crew would gather on Thursdays in the office of NBA commissioner David Stern or a few blocks away in the office of NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol—and they would immediately get to work on an unlikely project.
“We didn’t want to waste any time,” Ebersol said.
They were too busy exploring a bold idea: The world’s top basketball league was secretly thinking of starting a football league.
This was a few years before the 2001 launch of the first XFL. The only major spring football league had been the USFL of the 1980s, which died after a disastrous shift to a fall schedule in competition with the NFL. The NBA and its broadcast partner spied an opportunity.
“We had some credibility as a sports organization, and we were trying to figure out how else we could deploy our resources in a venture that could be additive for the NBA,” said Rick Welts, a former NBA executive who is now the president of the Golden State Warriors. “Was there a place for another pro football league between a network that could provide the TV visibility and the sports organization that could provide the structure?”
As it turned out, the answer was no.
“We had a bunch of meetings,” Welts said. “It never went anywhere.”
NBA commissioner David Stern, left, an Dick Ebersol, NBC Sports president, in 1993.
Photo: APTwo decades and one pandemic later, the delayed NBA playoffs and highly anticipated NFL season are set to compete for eyeballs in September and October. But the NBA and NFL nearly were in competition before—and few people knew about it. While the NBA’s football plan didn’t take off, the league and NBC were serious enough that they quietly studied the idea at the highest levels of both organizations for several months, Ebersol said.
What may be even more surprising is that it wasn’t the first time the NBA was approached about starting a football league. As it turned out, CBS had earlier asked the NBA to look into organizing a spring football league, according to people familiar with the situation.
The two football forays came as basketball was evolving from a national sidelight to a global phenomenon. The NBA’s brief flirtations with America’s most popular sport provide more evidence of the league’s stunning rise during that era.
“We started to have some success in the late ‘80s and early 90s, and I think that people in the marketplace did think we had a pretty good group that understood how to run a sports league,” said Russ Granik, the longtime deputy commissioner to Stern, who died in January. “It was starting to be understood as a business, not just running a bunch of games.”
Each time a TV network discussed a football league with the NBA, that network had just lost or pulled out of negotiations to renew their NFL broadcast rights. CBS stopped airing NFL games after the 1993 season. NBC’s last NFL game of the ‘90s was the 1998 Super Bowl.
The sharply climbing price of NFL broadcast rights made networks believe the public craved more. CBS and the NBA talked around 1994 about launching a spring football league, recalled Rick Gentile, former executive producer with CBS Sports.
Turner Broadcasting, which lost NFL broadcasts when NBC did, also was interested in exploring a spring football league, recalled former Turner Sports president Harvey Schiller. Schiller and Ebersol knew just the people to help them figure it out.
During the “NBA on NBC” period of 1990 to 2002, the leaders at the companies were “so close we could finish each other’s sentences,” Ebersol said. “David (Stern) was intrigued by what we were trying to do, so he and his key folks put a lot of time in it with us.”
Exactly what happened nearly three decades ago depends on the person you ask. In Schiller’s recollection, the NBA was going to help market the new football league. In Ebersol’s memory, the NBA would have been a league owner.
Ed Desser has another memory. Desser, who worked for more than 20 years in the NBA on media-rights deals and the launch of the league’s official website, recalled that the second football league—the one involving NBC—was more extensively explored. He doesn’t remember the exploratory group settling on a number of teams, but said they were looking at cities like Birmingham, Ala., and Las Vegas, because they were perceived as being underserved.
“The scheduling was going to be done in windows that the networks had available,” said Desser, founder of the California-based consultancy Desser Media Inc. “There were business models created just to see what it might look like, and what kind of attendance you’d need, what kind of ratings you’d need based upon particular salary allocation.”
There has long been something quixotic about spring football. There is no sport more popular in the U.S. than football, and yet it’s only played for less than six months. That leaves more than half a year to play more football—or at least that’s the idea that seduces ambitious executives with their eyes on the NFL’s piles of cash.
The eight-team Alliance of American Football—co-founded by Charlie Ebersol—filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy last year.
Photo: Logan Riely/Getty ImagesIt never quite works out that way. The eight-team Alliance of American Football—co-founded by Charlie Ebersol, Dick’s son—filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy during its first season last year. The rebooted XFL, launched in February and once again led by Vince McMahon of wrestling fame, declared chapter 11 in April as the coronavirus pandemic surged. It was sold in bankruptcy last week to an investment group that includes Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
But the problem was one that every upstart NFL competitor has eventually learned the hard way: It’s very expensive to play football. Rosters are large, injuries frequent and the rival company is the gold standard for commercial success.
It’s not an undertaking for the faint of heart,” Desser said, “or the thin of wallet.”
After those few intriguing months in the ‘90s, the NBA’s and NBC’s football talks ended, Ebersol said. The NBA had a lot going on. The WNBA started play in 1997. Weeks after Jordan helped the Bulls win their sixth title in 1998, an NBA lockout began and lasted through early 1999. NBC kept looking for a football league and found the short-lived XFL in 2001.
Now the network again has the premier game on Sunday nights, the NBA has become the NFL’s rival for cultural supremacy and they could find themselves battling on television screens this fall. The proposed date for a potential Game 7 of the NBA Finals was once Oct. 12—a Monday night during the NFL season. It was quickly changed to Oct. 13. There are no NFL games on Tuesday nights.
“Ultimately we just decided it didn’t make enough sense to pursue it,” Desser said. “But it doesn’t mean it wasn’t sort of an interesting dalliance.”
Share Your Thoughts
Do you think a spring football league could work? Join the discussion.
—Joe Flint contributed to this article.
Write to Rachel Bachman at rachel.bachman@wsj.com and Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
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