Covering the Intersection of Sports and the Law
This week’s news that the UFL has eliminated the Hartford Colonials from the league was hardly a surprise. The league’s financial problems were well documented and the Colonials have been rumored to be on the chopping block for some time. Despite only playing one season, we enjoyed the addition of the Colonials to the Connecticut sporting landscape. Here are [...]
The UFL has announced that there will be a season in 2011, but the season will not include the Hartford Colonials: The UFL has suspended operations in Hartford, Connecticut, where the Hartford Colonials played the 2010 season at the city’s Rentschler Field stadium. Colonials players will join the other four UFL teams through an allocation [...]
As you may have read by now, the UFL has suspended its training camp for 30 days and pushed back the start of its season due to financial issues. It’s fair to wonder whether this suspension will become permanent and the league will shut its doors. The Hartford Colonials are obviously affected by this development, [...]
Brad Kane of the Hartford Business Journal has an interesting piece on Hartford as a professional sports city and the UFL’s Hartford Colonials. The Colonials, who begin their second season on July 12, attracted an average of 14,366 fans to 4 games at Rentschler Field last season according to Kane. Here is an excerpt from the article with [...]
Twenty-three of players in last season’s Pro Bowl entered the NFL as undrafted free agents (UFAs), including Wes Welker, Arian Foster and Miles Austin. This statistic, along with the recent ESPN documentary Brady 6, serve as a reminder that scouting for the NFL Draft is an inexact science. Typically, NFL teams begin signing priority UFAs [...]
What are the implications of the decertification of the players’ union? NFL owners have been exempt from antitrust suits by their players on account of the non-statutory labor exemption. In its simplest terms, the non-statutory labor exemption favors union agreements over antitrust laws. (It is the non-statutory labor exemption that ultimately defeated Maurice Clarett’s challenge of the NFL’s [...]
With 2010 coming to a close, I have compiled a list of the top story lines and accompanying blog posts from the past year. Part I will list story lines 6 through 10; Part II will be posted tomorrow and will include 2 through 5; and the top story line will be posted on Monday, January 3. Thank you for your readership, [...]
As of December 1, not a single UFL player had made the jump to a NFL team, raising important questions concerning the intentions of two year-old league. The UFL’s insistence on collecting a $150,000 transfer fee was the obvious culprit. When the UFL lowered the transfer fee to $25,000 a few days later, the New England Patriots [...]
