Bill Hambrecht of WR Hambrecht and Google exec Tim Armstrong are ready to challenge the NFL with their new professional football league.

The New York Times's Play magazine reports that Hambrecht and Armstrong have teamed up to form the latest competitor to the National Football League, this time called the United Football League.

Hambrecht has been down this road before, once trying to compete with the NFL as a minority investor in a United States Football League team in the early 1980s. That league stayed afloat a mere three years, falling victim, Hambrecht says, to the savings and loan debacle.

Given the history of Hambrecht's investment in the USFL, and the more recent ill fate of the XFL, one wonders why Hambrecht and Armstrong have already sunk $2 million each into this arena football league.

"I really started thinking hard about this after the Los Angeles Rams left to go to St. Louis and the Houston Oilers went to Nashville," Hambrecht says.

The UFL plans to enter big cities without NFL teams (Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Mexico City are on the list), build up a fan base, and eventually sell shares of all teams to the public so that each franchise is owned equally by its owner, the league, and the fans.

Challenging the investment-banking establishment is hard enough. Now imagine setting your sights on the National Football League.

That’s the latest longshot project for Bill Hambrecht of WR Hambrecht, the boutique bank known for its unorthodox, auction-style approach to handling initial public offerings. Joe Nocera, writing for The New York Times’s Play magazine, reports that Mr. Hambrecht has joined forces with a Google executive to form the United Football League, and the pair has lined up their first team owner: Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team.

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