Birmingham Football Deserves Its Own Wikipedia Page

I took my two oldest boys to the USFL semi-final playoff games in Canton, OH, this past weekend. It was pretty close to us and pretty cheap. While we were there, we got to wondering about just how long long-suffering football fans in Birmingham have been suffering.

It turns out this is their TENTH football team. They had the Birmingham Americans (1974) and the Birmingham Vulcans (1975) in something called the World Football League, the Alabama Vulcans (1979) and the Alabama Magic (1982) of a minor league called the AFA, the Birmingham Stallions of the Original-Recipe USFL (1983-1985), the Birmingham Fire of the World League (1991-1992), the Birmingham Barracudas of the Canadian league (1995), the Birmingham Thunderbolts of the Original-Recipe XFL (2001), the Birmingham Iron of the AAF (2019), and now the back-from-the-dead Stallions, who will be in the championship game this coming weekend. In the past 50 years there has been professional football in Birmingham for 13 of them, more than 25% of the time. That's just somewhat better than Los Angeles, Saint Louis, or Nashville.

My sons enjoyed the games and I think they want to go back for the championship game. We'll be rooting for Birmingham--they're due.