Not many people watch the UFL in the spring, but Lions coach Dan Campbell says it\u2019s a place to see some talented professional football players \u2014 and he\u2019d like to see it become an official NFL farm system.<\/p>\n
Asked today whether he would like the NFL to adopt the UFL as a farm system, in which NFL teams could send players down to the UFL to get them more experience, and call them up when needed, Campbell first said that\u2019s way above his pay grade. But then he weighed in and said he approves of the idea.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t make those decisions \u2014 nobody cares what I think about that. I think it would be great. NFL Europe was awesome back in the day because that was a chance to really develop guys,\u201d Campbell said. \u201cWe\u2019ve gotten a couple players out of there and I know other teams have. You get to see them, they\u2019re playing in the spring so they\u2019re in shape, so they\u2019re just coming off running around, being football ready. That\u2019s enticing to us, too. If you need a guy, at least you know \u2014 you\u2019ve got evidence right there \u2014 versus someone who\u2019s been home for three months, they say they\u2019ve been working out but you don\u2019t know. It\u2019s not football working out like these guys are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last year the Lions signed Jake Bates from the UFL\u2019s Michigan Panthers, and he became one of the best kickers in the NFL. So Campbell knows first-hand that there\u2019s talent to be found in spring football. Even if the NFL has so far shown little interest in any kind of formal arrangement that turns the UFL into the NFL\u2019s official minor league.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not many people watch the UFL in the spring, but Lions coach Dan Campbell says it\u2019s a place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39147,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-39146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}