merge with the NFL (if not the whole league, then at least some teams.) The XFL didn't have individual team owners, it was all owned by NBC (who had recently lost the NFL and discovered, like CBS before them, that the only thing worse than paying through the nose for the NFL is NOT having it at all and wanted to televise pro football they could control) and WWF/E (because every time there is a boom for pro wrestling, Vince McMahon thinks he can expand into something else only to fall on his face doing it.)

I still don't know what the UFL was trying to do, it just sort of came and went.

People see that Americans like football and think "how can I make money off of it" not realizing that Americans don't like the sport of football like that. The NFL is the sport at it's highest level and dominates sports media landscape. College (and high school) football is tribal as hell and ties into people's youth and sense of loyalty like no other American sport does.

The AAF has neither of these things, and it's going to meet the same fate as those other leagues.