Carl Peterson was the most successful executive in the late, great United States Football League, which during the mid-1980s tried to carve out a niche in the NFL-dominated pro football world. His Philadelphia/Baltimore Stars won the last two championships in the league's three-year existence; and later, he spent two decades as the top football man for the Kansas City Chiefs.

Recently, Peterson was asked to assess the viability of another would-be challenger to the NFL, the United Football League, which kicks off a six-week premiere season this coming October. After making a number of duly diligent calls -- including conversations with two of the new league's four head coaches -- Peterson offered an insightful and detailed analysis.

When asked if the league would succeed, Peterson paused, chuckled, then paused again.

"Extremely difficult," he said in his deep baritone. "This is a precipitous time because the economy is affecting all of professional sports, even the National Football League."

Yes, even the NFL is reportedly in the process of cutting 150 jobs, 14 percent of its workforce. So how can another new professional football league possibly survive, even if it has an initially modest business plan?

"If you look at the definition of visionary," said Michael Huyghue, the UFL's commissioner, "it's doing something when everybody else is sitting on their hands."

Huyghue knows something about start-ups. In 1995, he was the general manager of the NFL expansion team in Jacksonville. In their second season, the Jaguars were in the AFC Championship Game. Still, his friends in the NFL gave him a hard time when they learned he would be overseeing the new league.

"The presumption is, 'Don't you know this doesn't work? Look at the history books. You must be a glutton for punishment,'" Huyghue said. "They thought it was a pretty big reach.

"But once I explained things to people -- the underserved markets, the quality of athletes out there -- I found almost wholesale support to do it. The personnel people we have, GMs from the NFL, the head coaches … these people couldn't all be drinking the Kool-Aid."
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