My involvement with the USFL began in the broadcast booth before I ever coached a game in the league.

I teamed with play-by-play man Jim Lampley on the first ever USFL telecast, a 28-7 win for the Chicago Blitz over the Washington Federals, and a mere two years later I was coaching the Federals franchise, which had been relocated to Orlando and renamed the Renegades.

We promptly lost our first six games of the season, not only coming out on the wrong end, but failing to even cover the spread. Talk about a bad situation.

	Corso

It made things pretty hard when I did my radio show live from a local bar and even harder when we went to live television. Those things are tough when your team can't cover.

We started a turnaround in Week 7, though, with a 28-17 victory against a Memphis team that went on to the league semifinals. That was the beginning of a 5-7 run over the last 12 weeks of the season thanks to good performances from guys like quarterback Reggie Collier, running back Curtis Bledsoe and wide receiver Joey Walters.

We came far enough that we were even able to score a 37-7 win over Steve Spurrier's Tampa Bay team, which had beaten us 35-3 in the opener. To this day I can say I was two points better than Spurrier in head-to-head matchups.

And if you compare what the Renegades did to our predecessors the Federals, it was a huge improvement. Sure we had just five wins, but the Federals won seven games combined in their two years of existence.

Collier was a good quarterback for us all year, rushing for 13 touchdowns and throwing 12 more, while Walters caught 58 balls and went on to have a long career in Canadian football, and both were typical USFL players.

The guys there were hungry. Many came to the USFL after being cut by NFL teams or failing to even make a roster, some were Canadian league players who wanted to make a step up, and every one of them wanted to prove he was good enough to make the NFL. I was happy in Orlando and had no NFL aspirations, but it was my goal to get the players to dedicate themselves to working hard for that shot.

How hungry were the guys in that league? We played the Los Angeles Express in the season finale and one of their quarterbacks, future NFL superstar Steve Young, played the second half of the game at fullback.

We also had a good staff working with those guys in Orlando: former Ball State head coach Billy Lynch was there; my special teams coach, Bruce DeHaven, has been an NFL assistant since 1987 and is now in Dallas with Bill Parcells; and I brought in a young guy named Steve Mariucci from the University of Louisville and gave him his first pro coaching job.

All that added up to an optimistic outlook for our second season. We had sold about 20,000 season tickets and added quarterback John Reaves from Tampa Bay, and I was going full-steam ahead with planning. I was in the process of hiring some new staff members and looking forward to a second year that was sure to be a lot easier than the first, when team owner Donald Dizney called my office one afternoon.

"We won the lawsuit," he said, referring to antitrust litigation the USFL brought against the NFL. "But we only got three dollars out of them."

That was that and I was effectively out of a job.

But that next year might not have been as easy as we hoped, anyway. As the USFL was looking like it was going to fold and the NFL was raiding our rosters, I got another call from Dizney.

"I've got some good news and some bad news," he said. "The good news is you didn't lose a single player, but the bad news is that the NFL didn't want any of them."

Lee Corso is currently an analyst for ESPN's college football coverage.