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United States Football League
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===Background=== For many decades after its inception, American football was widely regarded as a second-tier sport behind [[baseball]] which was long-regarded as America's national pastime. As a result, even the elite levels of American football generally lacked both the financial wherewithal to build their own facilities and the political clout to secure significant public funds to construct such venues, and as such were compelled to play primarily in [[ballpark]]s hastily re-purposed for football. However, since gridiron football in particular is responsible for excessive wear and tear on a natural grass playing field, baseball clubs were not keen to see football played in their parks throughout the entire baseball season. Thus, the need to use ballparks played a large part in ensuring that the [[National Football League]] and early rivals would delay the start of their seasons until September when the baseball season was winding down, thus affording baseball teams the exclusive use of their facilities in the spring and summer. Starting in the 1950s, a number of technological changes and trends eventually caused some to question the traditional timing of the American football season. In particular, football became a much more lucrative sport, the invention of artificial turf and developments in the growth and maintenance of natural grass made it more practical for baseball and football to be played at elite levels in the same facility at the same time of the year, and the increasing influence of television combined with the prevalence of a farm system in which Major League Baseball controlled the rights to baseball levels in all levels of play caused many minor league baseball clubs (some of whom played in large facilities that could be easily re-purposed for major league football) to be much less lucrative in their own right. Finally, the growing popularity of [[college football]] (which also played a fall season to coincide with the fall semester) led to the construction and expansion of dozens of large stadiums for collegiate teams, which were mostly football-specific or at least designed primarily for football, and were primarily in cities without professional football franchises. It was in this environment, in 1965, that [[David Dixon (businessman)|David Dixon]], a [[New Orleans]] antiques dealer, who would be instrumental in bringing the [[New Orleans Saints]] (and building their current home stadium, the [[Mercedes-Benz Superdome|Superdome]]) to his hometown,<ref>Richard Goldstein, [https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/sports/football/10dixon.html?hpw "David F. Dixon, Force Behind Saints and Superdome, Dies at 87"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161009195115/http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/sports/football/10dixon.html?hpw |date=October 9, 2016 }}, ''[[The New York Times]]'', August 9, 2010.</ref> began to envision [[American football|football]] as a possible spring and summer sport. This was not the first time the United States Football League name was used; there had been a previous, short lived attempt in [[All-America Football Conference#Founding|1945]]<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://twitter.com/QuirkyResearch/status/1400791751502225415/photo/1|title=On this date in 1945, the United States Football League folded|access-date=November 20, 2021|archive-date=November 24, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211124035714/https://twitter.com/quirkyresearch/status/1400791751502225415/photo/1|url-status=live}}</ref> to start up a league with that name.
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