On July 30th the UFL announced that the Birmingham Stallions and Houston Gamblers will be relocated. While Birmingham was a very controversial decision, most UFL fans did expect this for Houston. While the fans did not show up for this team over the past couple of year, it is not all on the city of Houston. The UFL, XFL, and even the USFL all contributed to creating the most dysfunctional market in the UFL through a series of bad decisions that ultimately led to the city losing their team.
2020 XFL
Before we talk about the ultra-modern era of spring football in Houston we need to talk about the 2020 Roughnecks. This Roughnecks team averaged 18,230 in attendance across three games at TDECU Stadium which was good enough for third best in the league. That team was the class of the league being 5-0 when the league shutdown with the next best teams being 3-2. This team was led by P.J. Walker at QB and June Jones at HC. This was a pre-pandemic era of spring football where it was still a very new concept to most people. That and how good the team was allowed for the Roughnecks to have such a great fan base. This would not be the same case in the new era of spring football after the pandemic, which leads us to the USFL and the first return of the Houston Gamblers.
2022-2023 USFL
In 2022 FOX decided to bring back the USFL from the 80’s to make a new spring football league. One of the eight teams they brought back was the Houston Gamblers. The Gamblers from the original USFL were most famous for having future HOF QB Jim Kelly and how they almost merged with the New Jersey Generals. The biggest issue with the 2022 USFL was the decision to play every game from Birmingham. This created the problem that seven of the teams were representing a city they were not based in which naturally hurt their ability to connect to their represented cities. The 2022 Gamblers were coached by Kevin Sumlin and had Chris Odom who gave perhaps the best single season of any player in the ultra-modern era with 12.5 sacks for 90 yards lost, six forced fumbles, nearly 30 solo tackles, and four blocked kicks. Despite him, the team would blow halftime leads in nearly every game to finish with a 3-7 record which was last in the South Division.
2023 USFL
In 2023 The Gamblers would be moved to Memphis as part of the 2023 USFL expansion. The USFL focused on getting teams to be fully based in their home markets. This was unlike the XFL and UFL that simply flew teams to stadiums form a central hub. This is important because the USFL was taking a slow and steady approach to expansion. The Stallions, Showboats, and Panthers would all be based in their cities while all the other teams were split between those three cities and Canton. This Gamblers team was coached by Curtis Johnson and would go 5-5 and finish third in the South Division. Two years of missing the playoffs and not being in Houston really hurt the market pull in Houston for the Gamblers. It also did not help that the XFL made a return this year and brought back the Roughnecks in Houston.
2023 XFL
In 2023 under new ownership the XFL made a return. The Houston Roughnecks would make a return in both Houston and TDECU Stadium. Instead of June Jones they were coached by Wade Phillips. AJ Smith would be the OC with their main QB being Brandon Silvers. This team went 7-3 and won the South Division. The biggest issue was that their losses came to the top three teams from the North Division. They would get bounced by the 4-6 Renegades in their first playoff game. This resulted in them being viewed as the fifth best team from the 2023 XFL season. The Roughnecks had an average attendance of 12,066. This was 6K (34%) drop in attendance from the pre-pandemic 2020 Roughnecks. This is important to show that Houston was already not supporting the Roughnecks the way they did in 2020, but 12K would be seen as elite here in 2026.
2024-2026 UFL
This all led to the merger to the UFL which is where Houston truly got hosed by the league. When the USFL and XFL merged there was one major snag that affected Houston. The USFL had a PA that forced the UFL to bring over at four USFL rosters. As mentioned earlier, the USFL only had three teams in their home markets. The final decision was to make the fourth USFL roster be the Gamblers who would change to the Roughnecks. This was seen as the best compromise from both leagues, but it had the consequence of alienating both the Roughnecks and Gamblers fan bases. The Gamblers fans were upset that they lost their team’s branding, and the Roughnecks fans were upset that they lost their roster and coaching staff. To make matters worse, TDECU was going under renovations forcing the team to play the 2024 season at Rice Stadium.
The 2024 Roughnecks would not be nearly as good as the 2023 Gamblers or Roughnecks. Under Curtis Johnson and a carousel of QBs the Roughnecks would go a league worst 1-9. What made it worse was in week 10 against the 1-8 Showboats the game would be for the #1 overall pick. Who ever won this Tank Bowl would get the top selection, and the Roughnecks would lose 19-12. Both of the Showboats’ wins that season came against Houston. The Roughnecks’ attendance would fall once again, this time to an average attendance of 7,056. This was a massive drop from 2023 of almost 5K (42%) per game exactly. This would be the worst team fielded in Houston, but despite that the team’s attendance would keep getting worse.
2025 UFL
For the 2025 season Houston would return to TDECU. The team would also get a new GM in Will Lewis who completely overhaul the roster for the 2025 season. These two moves were supposed to help get the market back on track with them returning to their good stadium and fielding a better on field product. The team would once again field three QBs but would get a very solid season out of Jalan McClendon. The team went 5-5 thanks to winning their last two games of the season. That was good enough for third in the USFL division. As for the attendance, it went down yet again. Their average attendance was 5,712 making it a drop of 1,300 (19%) from 2024. Then came 2026 where Houston would get another huge overhaul.
2026 UFL
Before the 2026 UFL season started we had a huge overhaul thanks in large part to the new co-owner Mike Repole. The Roughnecks would be rebranded back to being the Gamblers with a new modernized logo and new uniforms compared to the 2022-23 uniforms. The team would also get a former coach back in Kevin Sumlin who coached the 2022 Gamblers. The team would be somewhat changed due to the expansion draft that the UFL held this season. For the third consecutive season the Gamblers would have a QB carousel, but unlike 2025 where they eventually found a starter, this team would deal with constant injuries resulting in four QBs rotating the spot seemingly every half. The Gamblers would go 4-6 finishing tied with two other teams for the fifth best record in the league. They were just a play here and there away from making it to the playoffs.
The other huge change that the team had was they once again went to a different stadium. Repole’s vision of teams playing in 10K-25K seat stadiums meant the Gamblers had to move. They would play the 2026 UFL season at Shell Energy Stadium. Repole spent money on having every team have a home opener halftime show. Housoton would have Ludacris play at their home opener in week two. That game would have an announced attendance of 7,744 which was their best number since week one of 2024. The problem is that after this game the team would never have more than 6,200 in attendance. Across all five games they would average 5,683 which was just about 30 less than 2025. If you exclude the outlier home opener however, their attendance falls to 5,168 which would be about 550 (10%) less than 2025.
Final Thoughts
The Houston experiment has officially come to an end, and it was a mess. For this part the 2020 XFL season will not be mentioned since it was only brought up to set the stage and was from a past era from the ultra-modern Houston market. Across the six total seasons of a “Houston” team they would never play in the same stadium in back-to-back seasons. The USFL Gamblers went from Protective Stadium to Simmons Liberty Bank Stadium, the XFL Roughnecks were in TDECU, then the UFL Roughnecks/Gamblers started at Rice, then TDECU and finally Shell Energy Stadium. The Houston market would fall from 12,066 in 2023 to 5,683 which was a decrease of over 6K (53%) over that span. While it is true that the people of Houston did not show up for the team in the UFL, part of it was due to all the poor decisions mentioned throughout this article. It will be interesting to see where the team moves to and whether or not they keep the Gamblers brand but overall, this is most likely the end of spring football in Houston for a very long time.
