On May 24, 1982, the United States Football League (USFL) reached an agreement with ABC[1][2] and ESPN[3] on television rights.
Meanwhile, ESPN[7] generally televised two prime time games (on Saturdays and Mondays respectively) each week of the USFL season.
On Monday, March 7, 1983 the Michigan Panthers opened their 1983 schedule with a 9–7 win at Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama against the Stallons.
Major sponsors throughout the season included Gallo, Anheuser Busch, Buick, Chevrolet, Dodge, Honda and Miller.
Major USFL sponsors for ESPN in 1984 included Ford, Anheuser Busch, American Motors, DuPont, GMC, Mattel, Michelin, Nissan, Noxema, Timex and A.C. Delco.
The coverage was nonetheless quite low for a Big Three television network, with a June 17 prime-time regular season game between Chicago and Birmingham finishing as the lowest-rated prime time broadcast of the week, with a 4.8 rating.
In 1984, the league began discussing the possibility of competing head-to-head with the NFL by playing its games in the fall beginning in 1986.
Despite the protests of many of the league's "old guard," who wanted to stay with the original plan of playing football in the spring months, the voices of incoming Chicago owner Eddie Einhorn (who would never field his team in the league and did not even plan on doing so in 1986) and Generals owner Donald Trump and others would eventually prevail.
On August 22, 1984, the league's owners voted to go along with Einhorn and Trump's idea and begin playing a fall season in 1986.
The illness and death of the Bandits' owner derailed the efforts to maintain a presence of professional football in the spring.
With ABC now once again having college football to air on Saturdays, and the network reluctant to give up weeknight prime time, they no longer needed the USFL.
Not coincidentally, these markets were home to ABC's best-performing owned-and-operated stations--WLS-TV in Chicago, WABC-TV in New York and KABC-TV in Los Angeles.
As a result, despite finishing second in the Western Conference, they were forced to play on the road against the lower-seeded Memphis Showboats under pressure from ABC.
The network, who had considerable influence over the USFL due to the structuring of the league's television contract, did not want the embarrassment of having a game played in a near-empty Mile High Stadium.
The low attendance figures began to prove very embarrassing and frustrating both to the league and ABC, which had hoped for a more credible product to emanate from the nation's second-largest media market.
The Arizona Wranglers, despite having the worse record of the two participating teams, got to host the 1984 Western Conference championship game because the Coliseum was being prepared for the 1984 Summer Olympics.