The Washington Post just made public a vast trove of old documents related to their research on Donald Trump. I’m sure there are plenty of serious, important things in there. There is also this:
The NFL considered hilariously serious military plans to conquer the USFL in 1984
What you’re looking at is a presentation Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter gave to NFL executives in 1984, when the league felt threatened by the growth of the United States Football League (USFL). Donald Trump owned a USFL team, which is how this all connects.
Founded in 1982, the USFL made some swift and meaningful inroads on the football landscape -- they snatched a few big-name players, probed fruitful football markets and actually got some people watching. The league soon unraveled because of instability and mismanagement, and a crucial blow was filing an antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, claiming the larger league had basically undertaken a targeted bullying campaign against them in hopes of maintaining their American football monopoly. The USFL ended up getting almost no money (three dollars!) from their settlement because the court determined their failure was largely their own fault, but they did technically win the case of proving that the NFL was an illegal monopoly.
One of the big pieces of evidence is pictured here, and it’s hilarious. Newspapers at the time of the trial spoke of the notorious Porter Presentation, but I don’t believe it’s ever been widely seen in its whole form. Basically, the idea of an NFL campaign against the USFL was initially floated as a cartoonishly explicit declaration of war. Like, it literally quotes Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War up front:
... before diving into the previously pictured breakdown of how a strategy of moving the date of the NFL Draft or aggressively pursuing USFL players for NFL contracts equates to “BESIEGING WALLED CITIES.” My biggest unfulfilled wish is that this presentation had been composed in the age of PowerPoint, so bits like this could be followed with sweet explosion-style transitions:
That’s some Tom Clancy shit!
But yeah, check out the full document for some pretty fun reading about plans to disrupt USFL gate revenues, send bad players to the USFL, steal the best franchises, and encourage USFL unionization. As mentioned in the above Times article, the NFL tried very hard to deny ever enacting any of Porter’s plans, but it’s fascinating (and funny) to see what those plans could have been. And, ya know, the NFL lost this case, yet remains an untouchable football monolith, so things turned out fine for those guys.
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