The UFL’s player procurement system will look very different in 2026 than it did the previous two years. Gone are team general managers; decisions about what players are on what teams will be made by the league office, likely with input from head coaches.
There will also be the implementation of a territory system, where teams will have the right of first refusal on players who attended college locally. And those are the two major changes that we know about; there could be more as we approach training camp and the regular season.
The focus of this article is on the territorial assignments. While it’s easy to talk about and there are legitimate reasons for wanting to utilize such a method, it’s a lot more difficult to flesh out in practice. I wanted to tackle four major aspects of this system that will have to be worked out: The actual schools that will qualify as a team’s “territory”; what the player eligibility requirements may be; and how the assignments will be applied to both the college draft and free agency.
There are a number of different directions the UFL could take this, and in this article, I’ll give some of those possibilities, as well as how I’d prefer it to be executed.
Selecting the schools
Among the reasons speculated as to why the UFL eliminated the general manager positions (no one from the league has spoken publicly on it to give an official explanation) is that ownership and management want to increase parity amongst its eight franchises. It’s difficult to sustain interest for a team locally when they are quickly eliminated from playoff contention, especially when that team hasn’t had time to establish deep roots in the community.
Parity should also be the goal of selecting the schools that will be under the territorial banner for each team. However, that is no easy task. It becomes more difficult when you set the requirement as a 100-mile radius within the city, as new owner Mike Repole has mentioned. Hopefully, that is not set in stone because some wiggle room will be needed for the sake of that parity.
But let’s first take the 100-mile comment as face value. A quick Google search gave me these results for colleges that offer football within 100 miles of each UFL team:
Birmingham: Alabama, UAB, Samford
Columbus: Ohio State, Miami University, Ohio University
Dallas: North Texas, SMU
D.C.: Maryland, Howard
Houston: Houston, Texas Southern, Rice, Texas A&M
Louisville: Louisville, Kentucky
Orlando: Central Florida, South Florida
St. Louis: Missouri Baptist, Lindenwood
Now, there may be a few that I missed, but this is the gist of the list. As you can see, all is not equal here. The 100-mile boundary will have to be played with a little bit in order to give some of these teams a fighting chance for top players.
In trying to come up with a possible list of colleges, I first had to come up with how many each team will have to choose from. I think anywhere from three to five is where the league will land, but as we can see, even stretching it to five colleges is going to require the boundaries to be increased significantly in some cases. I’m not a huge fan of territory protections in the first place, so my list featured three eligible schools for each UFL team.
Next, I had to figure out how to make it more equal. You can’t have one UFL team able to protect players from three Power Five Schools and another with mostly FCS teams. So for my list, I stretched the 100-mile boundary and I gave each UFL team two Power Five schools and one Group of Five school. That worked out almost perfectly. Here is what I came up with:
Birmingham: Alabama, Auburn, UAB
Columbus: Ohio State, Cincinnati, Ohio University
Dallas: Texas, SMU, North Texas
D.C.: Maryland, Virginia Tech, James Madison
Houston: Houston, Texas A&M, Rice
Louisville: Louisville, Kentucky, Western Kentucky
Orlando: Florida, Central Florida, South Florida
To me, this seems like a pretty fair spread and for the most part, I didn’t have to stretch far beyond the 100-mile radius set by Repole. Some teams have more options than others, like Birmingham and Columbus in terms of the schools available to them (the state of Ohio has several MAC schools that could be interchanged with Ohio University, for example). There are likely some non-negotiables as well, like Ohio State with Columbus and Louisville with, well, Louisville.
The league could throw in an FCS school for each team, too, if they want to show some love to the lower levels. True parity will never be achieved with this exercise because even within Power Five conferences, some teams are stronger than others, and that can and will change over time.
The only team I truly struggled with in coming up with colleges for their territories was St. Louis. Missouri would be the obvious, and I bet that’s one they go with, but it’s outside the 100-mile radius. I had Missouri and Missouri State as two but couldn’t come up with a second Power Five school. The Dome at America’s Center is right on the Missouri border with Illinois so I contemplated putting the Fighting Illini on the list. However, they are located in the far north region of Illinois, whereas St. Louis is located near the southwest border with that state. The University of Indiana is actually closer than Illinois, but that’s a whole other state over.
It will be interesting to see what schools the UFL settles on as feeders for the Battlehawks. What this exercise shows is that while it’s easy to want a territorial system and to throw out “schools within 100 miles,” it’s a lot more difficult in practice, especially with the specter of parity lording over the proceedings.
Who will be eligible?
Now that the schools are settled, there has to be a determination as to WHO can lay claim to being from that school in qualifying to be a protected player. Is it any player that attended that school for any length of time? Should there be a time requirement (they must have played there for at least two years, for example). Or is it players who enter pro football having last attended that school?
The current era of college football almost makes this entire idea obsolete. After all, the point of territorial selections is to keep players, identifiable to the local fanbase and associated with the local colleges, close to home. How many players these days are truly associated with any one school anymore? Then ask yourself, how many players these days are truly associated with any one school that DON’T end up in the NFL? That’s why I wonder if there should be a time component.
My guess is it ends up being any player who attended that school. Repole seems to really like this idea so I can’t see him putting steep restrictions on it, at least right away. This would also open up more players to this process. But I’d like to see it be that either the player graduated from that school (that’s the school that will be associated with his pro bio going forward) or that they spent at least two or three years at the college
What’s the possibility the UFL expands their allocation process to local high school stars as well? In some parts of the country, high school football is just as ingrained in the community as college football, perhaps even more so. Will players who went to high school near Houston, for example, be able to qualify as an allocated player even if they played elsewhere in college?
I’d pass on this, not because I think it’s a terrible idea, but rather I imagine it would further strain the UFL’s personnel office that has already taken on much greater responsibility this season. Burdening them with researching the high school(s) attended by each player coming into the league would further tax a group already being stretched thin.
Applying the Territorial System to the College Draft
Initially expected to take place in the fall, the changes to the league’s personnel department has pushed the College Draft back to a date indeterminate. My expectation is that a draft will still take place, though with the territorial system in place, it will look quite different than last year’s version.
How might this be handled? There are two potential ways the league could integrate it. First, have a “territorial” draft separate from the actual draft, where teams can protect eligible players from their schools. They could have a set amount that each team has to acquire, or have “up to” a certain number, allowing for more flexibility from teams. Then, they could have the normal draft where players not protected from territory colleges are then put into the general draft pool, able to be selected by any other team.
If teams are allowed to choose the number of players they protect, the UFL could opt to have those teams “lose” that number of draft picks at the end of the draft. That would ensure each team walks away with the same number of players. For example, if Orlando protected three players and the draft is 10 rounds, they’d draft for the first seven rounds and would sit out the final three, as those protected players would count as their final draft picks. That would add a level of strategy to it as well: If you’re a head coach, is someone worth protecting over a player you COULD draft in the later rounds? The other option is to simply allow teams to choose how many players to protect, while giving them all the same amount of general draft picks.
The second way is to integrate the territorial selections into the draft itself. Have the first few rounds be territorial picks only, then open up the entirety of the draft pool after whatever that set number might be. My preference would be to have the separate selections, allowing teams the choice of how many players to protect (with a maximum in place), then removing that number of picks from that team’s draft so that each team walks away with the same number of selections.
Obviously, even that is not real parity since not every player drafted will choose to join the UFL. You could have a team draft 10 players and protect six, and another team draft 10 and protect one, and the team that leaves the draft with 11 players could have more choose to participate in the league than the team that had 16. If history holds, that team with 16 would retain the rights to those that opted not to join, so in reality, that still tilts the scales in their direction.
Applying the Territorial System to Free Agency
In this case, “free agency” is not meant to refer to the UFL’s half-hearted attempt earlier this off-season in which players who accumulated two or more years on a team would be free to sign with another team in the league. I’m talking about new players entering the league who had not been a part of the UFL – or even spring football – before.
The territorial process is expected to apply to new players entering the league throughout the year – not just via the draft. This should be a bit more of a streamlined process, especially with player procurement being done at the league level.
As players sign contracts with the league, they should go into a pool to be claimed by teams. Those players who are eligible as territorial selections should be made available to those teams first. After a 24-hour period (or 48-hours, or whatever time limit the league wants to put on it), if a player is not claimed through the territorial process, they’d go into the general pool to be claimed by any of the seven other teams.
I can’t really think of an alternative to this aspect of the process. The only malleable part may be the waiting period – but when a player signs with the league, he’s likely to want to be assigned as quickly as possible, especially if it’s during the season. That time should therefore be as short as possible.
Conclusion
It’s no wonder we’ve yet to hear anything official from the league on this and why all player movement has basically been paused for some time. There are a lot of small but key decisions to be made in how this system is carried out. It’s also important to note that, with a two-year contract having been signed last spring, it’s possible the player’s union will be consulted on some aspects of the implementation as well to make sure the league doesn’t make any grievable decisions, if only to avoid another public relations headache.
If the application of territory protections works as intended, the league will get some much-needed positive press in these markets and will draw fans out to games that otherwise might have stayed at home. If it doesn’t work and stadiums are empty and there’s lethargic interest in team cities, it’s likely that would’ve been the case even without the territory system in place. Unless the school selections threaten the competitive balance of the league in a major way, this may end up being a low-risk, high-reward proposition, exactly the type of changes the UFL and Repole should be aiming for in year three.