• Six of the seven teams in the Western Conference dropped out of play after the 1985 season, leaving only the
Arizona Outlaws. In contrast, all seven teams from the Eastern Conference were slated to return intact. • The
San Antonio Gunslingers folded after its owner,
Clinton Manges, abandoned the team partway through the previous season. • The
Oakland Invaders,
Portland Breakers and league-owned
Los Angeles Express all pulled out of competition, citing financial problems. • The
Denver Gold, one of two teams to vote against moving to a fall schedule, sold its football assets to the
Jacksonville Bulls, after initially announcing its intent to move to Portland to take the place of the Breakers. • The
Houston Gamblers assets were sold to the
New Jersey Generals in a complicated series of transactions that had the Gamblers sold to
Stephen M. Ross, merging the Gamblers with the Generals (with the Gamblers' previous owner retained as team president), and Generals owner
Donald Trump buying out Ross's stake after Ross raised concerns about the Generals' debt load. • Stephen Ross then bought the
Baltimore Stars, who were to move to
Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, after playing the previous season at the
University of Maryland's
Byrd Stadium in
College Park due to conflicts with baseball. • A franchise representing
Chicago, to be owned by
Eddie Einhorn and a replacement for the widely unpopular
Chicago Blitz, was originally to begin play in the fall 1986 season; for reasons unknown, Chicago was left off the 1986 schedule. As the Chicago team would not have had access to
Soldier Field and because Einhorn was a part-owner of the
Chicago White Sox, the team would have likely had to move to
Comiskey Park, a stadium that had not hosted football since 1958. • No
expansion teams were slated to be added. A major point of uncertainty was the case of the
Tampa Bay Bandits. The Bandits were in ownership turmoil as the result of co-owner Stephen Arky's 1985 suicide and the terminal illness of majority owner
John F. Bassett, who died in May 1986; even if Bassett had been well enough to continue in the league, he was an outspoken opponent of sharing a market with the NFL's
Buccaneers in the fall and had planned to pull the Bandits out of the league to start a spring circuit of his own, which at one point—possibly due to delirium brought on by brain cancer—Bassett had proposed as a multiple-sport league. Eventually, the league found an ownership group willing to take Bassett's place: Lee Scarfone and Tony Cunningham agreed to field the Tampa Bay Bandits in the USFL for the fall 1986 season. However, it soon became known that Scarfone and Cunningham had gone into significant debt to buy out Bassett's rights and were left bankrupt when, on August 4, 1986, a judge ordered the seizure of all of the team's assets to cover the contract of
Bret Clark, a safety Bassett had signed in early 1985. Arky's suicide also threatened the
Birmingham Stallions' existence. Arky's father-in-law Marvin Warner had owned the Stallions, and the sequence of events that led to Arky's suicide, the exposure of securities fraud at Arky's company ESM Government Securities, sparked a
bank run on
Home State Savings Bank when it was revealed that most of ESM's money had been deposited in that bank, wiping out most of Warner's net worth. The team's limited partners, along with a bailout from the city of Birmingham, kept the team afloat during 1985. The loss of the Western Conference required a realignment of the league's (ostensibly) eight remaining teams. The three Florida teams would have joined Arizona as the "Independence Division", while the "Liberty Division" would comprise the four other teams. •
Independence Division •
Arizona Outlaws •
Jacksonville Bulls •
Orlando Renegades •
Tampa Bay Bandits •
Liberty Division •
Baltimore Stars •
Birmingham Stallions •
Memphis Showboats •
New Jersey Generals ==Head coach changes==