1986 USFL season
| 1986 United States Football League season | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regular season | ||||
| Duration | September 13, 1986 – January 11, 1987 | |||
| Playoffs | ||||
| Start date | January 17, 1987 | |||
| Championship | ||||
| Date | February 1, 1987 | |||
| Site | Gator Bowl, Jacksonville, FL | |||
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The 1986–87 USFL season would have been the fourth season of the United States Football League. Plans and a schedule had been set for a 1986 season, which (unlike the previous three seasons, which were played in spring) would have played in the autumn and winter months, but the failure to secure a large judgment or concessions through a landmark antitrust lawsuit against the National Football League, combined with the seizure of one of the team's assets, days before the season was to begin led the league to postpone, then ultimately cancel the season and cease operations.
A major point of uncertainty was the case of the Tampa Bay Bandits. The Bandits were in ownership turmoil as the result of co-owner Stephen Arky's 1985 suicide and the terminal illness of majority owner John F. Bassett; even if Bassett had been well enough to continue in the league, he was an outspoken opponent of sharing a market with the NFL's Buccaneers in the fall and had planned to pull the Bandits out of the league to start a spring circuit of his own. Eventually, the league found an ownership group willing to take Bassett's place: Lee Scarfone and Tony Cunningham agreed to field the Tampa Bay Bandits in the USFL for the fall 1986 season. However, it soon became known that Scarfone and Cunningham had gone into significant debt to buy out Bassett's rights and were left bankrupt when, on August 4, 1986, a judge ordered the seizure of all of the team's assets to cover the contract of Bret Clark, a safety Bassett had signed in early 1985.
The loss of the Western Conference required a realignment of the league's (ostensibly) eight remaining teams. The three Florida teams would have joined Arizona as the "Independence Division," while the "Liberty Division" would comprise the four other teams.
Three teams would have entered the 1986 season with new head coaches.
The 1986 USFL Draft was held May 6, 1986; as in 1983 and 1985, the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City hosted the draft. The Orlando Renegades selected Mike Haight, an offensive tackle from the Iowa Hawkeyes football team, as the first overall pick; Haight would instead sign with the NFL's New York Jets before the USFL season was postponed. The 1986 draft was complicated by the fact that a number of teams had traded draft picks to and from teams that had folded; under the draft rules for 1986, all teams, defunct or not, were included, and any draft pick that was held by a defunct team (either by trade or original award) was skipped over. (For example, the Bandits traded away their first round draft pick to the Denver Gold; as the Gold had pulled out of the league by 1986, and they held that pick, it was skipped over, even though the Bandits still existed.)
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