The USFL does not have a dominant strategy. Its best move is always to play during the NFL’s off season. Clearly this is not independent of what the NFL does. The NFL, however, does have a dominant strategy. It prefers the fall season independent of the USFL’s choice; observe that the numbers in its first column, 70 and 100, are uniformly bigger than the corresponding numbers, 50 and 35, in the second column.

What should happen in this game? The NFL should pick its dominant strategy, namely the fall. The USFL, by putting itself in the NFL’s cleats, should be able to predict that the NFL will play in the fall. Then, the USFL should choose the spring.

These predictions remain true for a wide range of potential fall and spring market sizes. Given a 70:30 market split between the NFL and USFL, the fall market can be anywhere from 43 percent to 233 percent bigger than the spring market and the same predictions fall out. Given this robustness of our result, we conclude that the USFL’s move to a fall schedule was a mistake, and one that may very well have cost them their existence.