JoeFromBaltimore

Grimdark, fantasy, sci-fi, absurdist sci-fi, speculative fiction --

Looking to get some reps and help somebody actually finish a book. I’m not looking to take over your world—I want to work inside your sandbox as a co-writer and help push the project across the finish line. I come at this with an engineering/project-management grindset. I’ve published fiction and nonfiction, and had technical articles appear in national trade publications.

I’m especially useful if you already have chapter beats, scene notes, an outline, or a partial manuscript. Give me the setup and what a chapter needs to accomplish, and I can turn it into a first-pass draft for you to revise, expand, polish, or complet

Anybody have a rough SWAG on how the UFL did financially this season? Not looking for exact numbers—we probably won't get those. I'm just curious what people think the league's operating loss (or profit) was after TV, sponsorships, ticket sales, and expenses. What's your best educated guess, and why?

The shrink-the-field move looks a hell of a lot less like a random “make the game better” tweak and a lot more like stealth de-risking for U.S. expansion. If you cut down the length and trim the end zones, suddenly the CFL can fit into a lot more American venues, especially MLS and USL soccer stadiums, without turning the place into a full-blown construction project. That matters because once the league can physically fit into those buildings, the old excuse of “we can’t really play there” gets a lot weaker. To me, that looks like the first step in making the product movable, portable, and ready for stateside testing.

And once you look at the UFL, the TV side starts making sense too. You do

I’m actually good with Washington State and Oregon State rebuilding the Pac-12. Yeah, I know — heresy. Infidel. Whatever. The old Pac-12’s gone. I’ve made peace with that.

That said, over the next 10 years down here in Texas, I’m going to see way more Wazzu football on TV than I ever would’ve before. Them landing on The CW? Honestly, that’s a win for me. National coverage, prime slots, and they’ll be playing in San Marcos every other year against Texas State? I’ll take it.

Do I miss the Rose Bowl era? Yeah. I was there when Gesser led them there 25 years ago. But I’m also a realist. And from where I’m sitting, this setup works.

I’m probably in the minority here, but I think the new Pac-12

Let’s look at this. The UFL has reasonable TV numbers and probably isn’t bleeding out. Maybe they’re losing $30–40 million a year? That’s like… two episodes of Andor or Loki. For Fox and RedBird, that’s lunch money. Which tells me one thing: the NFL wants this thing to live—they just don’t want their fingerprints on it.

Now look at the history:

• USFL 2.0 grew out of The Spring League. Fox propped it up, then cut Brian Woods loose when it plateaued - Dude had no game on that level.
• The XFL came back as a vanity play—The Rock slinging tequila and talking about “the 53rd man,” while Dany Garcia tried to build a league off Instagram posts. She’s an influencer, not a sports operator.
• T

Here are the average viewership numbers through 9 weeks of the UFL season:

• ABC (8 games): 872,125
• FOX (17 games): 659,000
• FS1 (1 game): 516,000
• ESPN (9 games): 456,667

I don’t know what the final losses and money bleed will be this year, and yeah, the attendance has been pretty brutal in some markets. But these TV numbers aren’t bad, especially considering the league’s total cost is less than what FOX was losing annually on WWE.

For networks, this is cheap live football that fills dead air and holds a consistent audience. For the NFL, it’s a developmental lab that prevents future headaches with the collapsing NCAA pipeline. O-Line being the key here - From my pers

Yeah, I went down the old trope where people from our world get dumped into a magical one — but we’re doing it differently.

We’ve got Tom and Dana — two regular folks from our world — who get dropped into a place where magic exists and it’s not all sunshine and fairy dust.
We’ve got Teph — a half-elf who identifies as a dwarf (yeah, seriously — we explain it in the prologue).
We’ve got Kye — Teph’s right hand, a steppe horse archer who doesn’t do second chances.

Our dwarves? Not bumbling, greedy drunks or comedy relief. Think grimdark with logistics: forge points, border forts, real infrastructure holding back orc invasions.
And yes, there’s dark humor. Yes, there’s violence. No, t

Here is my take - if you look behind the scenes, there are some smart business moves at play by the big players. Consider the recent split between MLB and ESPN; ESPN is clearly dumping high-dollar content that isn’t giving the ROI they need. So, what’s the low-cost, made-for-TV product that they already have in house? The UFL.

Now, take a look at who’s behind the UFL: RedBird Capital, the JV partner with the NFL on Sunday Ticket, and Fox, which just moved the UFL to the Friday night slot. And here’s a kicker—the UFL just signed a lease on office space just a couple of miles from Jerry World. I’ve been through enough layoffs to know that companies in financial distress aren’t signing new lea