Not long ago, it was possible, watching the N.F.L.’s ratings decline, to imagine that the country’s most popular form of entertainment was in the process of collapsing under the weight of moral umbrage and fatigue. There was the ugly toll of unending concussions, and the occasionally obtuse leadership of the N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Goodell, and the apparent conspiracy among the league’s owners to deprive Colin Kaepernick, one of the sport’s more marketable players, of a job, for craven political reasons. And then there was the President of the United States stirring up crowds—at rallies, not football games—with his complaints that the game had gone “soft,” and even encouraging coaches to fire the predominantly African-American players whom he accused of being insufficiently patriotic and deferential. “Notwithstanding the N.F.L.’s year-round ability to be compelling, something was happening to this sport,” Mark Leibovich wrote in his best-selling “Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times,” which came out at the start of this past season. “Football felt less confident and more precarious, at least from the outside.”

From the inside, however, those “distractions,” as they were often called, were always seen as a kind of Times reader’s fantasy. The real problem, according to a theory that circulated among professional football minds, was not cultural or political but developmental: the quality of play was slipping. (And this was before the recent, abysmal Super Bowl.) Specifically, the problem could be traced to two positions: quarterback and offensive line. There weren’t enough good QBs, and there weren’t enough overfed men who could adequately protect what few Aaron Rodgerses and Tom Bradys there were. The lack of pocket protection made it harder for mediocre passers to impress, and increased the likelihood of injuries that would in turn deprive fans of the sport’s most recognizable personalities. Why the shortfall? The theory offered an explanation, however speculative and unlikely-sounding to an outsider. It involved the demise, in 2007, of the N.F.L. Europe League. N.F.L. Europe may have been intended to spread the global brand of a distinctly American pastime, but its real value, the idea went, lay in serving as a training ground for American college stars who weren’t yet ready to adjust to the pro-style game played at home. It was the minor league we never knew we needed, and its absence was being felt, years later, in the television-watching households of Indianapolis and San Diego and Cleveland.

I heard this theory recently from Charlie Ebersol, the founder of the Alliance of American Football, a professional “spring” league that will open its inaugural season this weekend—“so that the saddest Sunday in America”—i.e., the Sunday after the Super Bowl—“doesn’t have to be spent at the flea market,” as Ebersol put it. Instead, “you can spend it on your couch, watching football.” The Memphis Express, coached by the Chicago Bears legend Mike Singletary, will be playing the Birmingham Iron at 4 P.M. Eastern. And, at 8 P.M., the Salt Lake Stallions will take on the Arizona Hotshots. (There are also two Saturday-night games, with the San Diego Fleet playing the San Antonio Commanders and the Atlanta Legends playing the Orlando Apollos.) There are eight teams, all told, stocked with players who, for the most part, have made cameos on N.F.L. rosters in recent years. The season runs until late April, with a championship to be held in Las Vegas. There will be no kickoffs, “because the kickoff is the least popular play among fans,” Ebersol said. “Also, the highest likelihood of a concussion.” The play clock will be thirty-five seconds instead of the usual forty. They are aiming for games that finish in two and a half hours, tops. Otherwise, it ought to look pretty familiar.

Ebersol and I were watching Monday Night Football at a bar in Manhattan, and he was describing his experience raising money for the new venture, which is backed by, among others, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and the Chernin Group, the majority owner of the proudly obnoxious blog network Barstool Sports. “Everybody would say to me, in my pitches, ‘Well, what are you going to do about the fact that N.F.L. ratings are down?’ ” he recalled. In other words, if the flagship is in decline, is that really the best time to be launching a spinoff? “I’d point to Andrew Luck being injured as the primary reason A.F.C. ratings were off,” Ebersol said, alluding to 2017, when the Indianapolis Colts QB was sidelined while rehabbing his shoulder. “All of a sudden, the interest level of Colts fans shifts down. And you can track that number—depending on how high profile the person is that gets injured, you see the whole rating for that network dive.” He went on, “The N.F.L. is so fun to grave-dance on that nobody wanted to look at that kind of granularity. But, look, players aren’t hurt this year, and ratings are up, what, twelve per cent?” The lesson seemed to be that football is indomitable—“People like American football,” he said—and we could certainly use another league, which, if nothing else, would only help improve the quality of the premier product.

“If you were designing a sport for television, this is what would come out of the laboratory ninety-nine times out of a hundred,” he said, gesturing at one of the giant screens overhead in the bar, where Seahawks and Vikings players were piled on top of one another. “The field is literally the shape of a television. They literally move from the left side of a wide-screen TV to the right side. They stop every seven to twelve seconds and completely reset on a measured amount of time, in which I can give you all the drama, and then they have high action for a period of time, and then they reset. And then they move in the opposite direction.” When he put it that way, it didn’t sound all that obviously compelling; I’d been thinking about the riveting violence, and the gladiatorial pageantry, and the fact that there just aren’t very many games, which lends a sense of dramatic urgency to every fourth-down call. But I took his point. “Your average N.F.L. rating is six times the rating of the next four sports combined,” he said, exaggerating only slightly. In an ever-fragmenting entertainment market, surely the lone ratings behemoth could be cloned for spillover benefits.

“I look at myself as water in the desert,” Ebersol continued. “I’m not going to the ocean and trying to sell fish. I look at it, like, for some reason that still, to me, exceeds understanding, there’s no football six months of the year!”

The last spring football league to generate any attention involved Ebersol’s father, Dick, the former chairman of NBC Sports, who worked with Vince McMahon, of the W.W.E., to create the X.F.L., which McMahon once described as the “Xtra Fun League.” It placed an emphasis on cheerleaders, “smash-mouth” play, and wrestling-style promotion. “This will not be a league for pantywaists and sissies,” McMahon said; the players wore nicknames, such as “He Hate Me,” on the backs of their jerseys. The X.F.L. launched in 2001 and was laughed out of existence before 2002. Charlie Ebersol directed a documentary about the failed experiment, called “This Was the XFL,” for ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, which premièred in February, 2017. In its final scene, Dick Ebersol and McMahon meet for dinner and reminisce, over red wine and a white tablecloth, about their old misadventures. Ebersol asks, “Do you ever have any thoughts about trying again?”