The draft was a real killer this year. A 60-year-old coach sits in a secluded room, surrounded only by the intense and focused faces of his two closest advisers. The draft board is a few yards away, tempting the old coach with both opportunity and blunder.

Dennis Green has made decisions in rooms like this for years. He coached the Minnesota Vikings for almost a decade and then the Arizona Cardinals for three seasons. Now he is the head coach for one of four teams in the start-up United Football League.

Green's San Francisco team possesses the first draft pick -- who is worth not just a team's future but perhaps the future of an entire league. Hundreds of hopeful employees, dozens of desperate players, millions of stretched-thin dollars. It all depends on this draft, the next few months and the gamble that this latest challenger to the NFL packs a new kind of punch -- a kind the heavyweight champ won't see coming.

It's June 18. Green eyes the draft board and feels the pressure. Every decision is important. Each move is crucial. Each pick is -- "Dad," Green's 12-year-old daughter, Vanessa, yells from a few feet away. "We're going to take this guy here."

The coach nods, and San Francisco drafts former Western Michigan tight end Branden Ledbetter. Vanessa made the call, and Green's wife, Marie, marked Ledbetter off the list of available players. Green says he couldn't have done it without his daughter and wife in the draft room with him. The coach was on vacation in Wisconsin on draft day, and he wanted his family with him, lightening the mood and, heck, helping him make the tough decisions. The UFL is in its infancy, and keeping things casual saves money and dampens stress.

"I would circle the player," Green says, "and Vanessa would find the player, and we made our pick.

"Five seconds, and we had our name."

Those are a few of the advantages, Green says, the new league has over the NFL: a low-cost and streamlined atmosphere with no filler or grandiose production. Five seconds is machine-gun style compared with the 10 minutes that the NFL grants teams between first-round draft slots, much of that time designed to build suspense for a massive television audience.

Green says the UFL's simplicity helped lure him from retirement. And it's more football for a nation that Green believes is hungry for at least one more helping. Fridays are for high schools, Saturdays for colleges, Sundays and Mondays for the NFL. Green thinks Thursdays were awfully boring without a football game on the calendar, and that's when most UFL contests will be televised this fall, on the cable channel Versus. Some games will be broadcast on Wednesdays and Fridays, too.

But this has been done, hasn't it? The upstart league against the mighty NFL -- that's a kamikaze mission for investors and a weak substitute for fans. Many have figured out the hard way that the NFL is king and leaves upstart leagues for dead on the side of the road.

Michael Oriard is a professor at Oregon State and author who has studied the NFL's success and America's thirst for football. He said that the UFL might attract a few fans but the league should enter its inaugural season with no delusions of causing panic at the NFL offices.

"Maybe there are these little niche markets for things like that," Oriard said, "but the NFL is not going to be threatened in any way.

"I'm skeptical that this thing is going to be very successful. I don't think people are hungry for more football. There's a ton of football on. Anything that presents itself as professional football that's demonstrably worse than the NFL, is going to be at a huge disadvantage."

But Green says the league's secret is its business plan and its view of itself as a minor-league system for the NFL. Green says the UFL's decision-makers are former NFL employees, the kind of people who learned that the NFL made mistakes on its way to the top. The UFL's leaders have no intention of repeating those lapses.

UFL commissioner Michael Huyghue, a longtime former Jacksonville Jaguars executive, says salaries are non-negotiable -- players aren't allowed to have agents -- and will be capped at $60,000 for the six-game season. Huyghue says that some of the NFL's tallest challenges are rising salaries, which make up about 70 percent of NFL teams' costs, and the reliance on big television contracts. That TV money then fuels players' contract demands, creating a cycle of teams looking beyond ticket sales to pay players -- to simply break even.

Huyghue says most NFL team owners make a profit only from non-NFL events at their team's stadium. He says the NFL's financial model, fueled by the salary cap, is a "backward system," and the wheel keeps spinning and spinning until it veers toward losing control.

"That system is flawed," he says. "What started as a panacea in the NFL turned into a debacle."

The UFL won't have the problems that stem from high salaries, Huyghue says. Players will earn no more than about the NFL's practice-squad minimum, about $10,000 per week, and starting quarterbacks are reportedly the only players who will earn the maximum $60,000. Huyghue says that if the UFL makes money, future players will earn more, too, but that's the only way salaries might rise. The UFL is targeting NFL castoffs or players who have practice-squad talent, and the upstart league is offering salaries similar to what those NFL practice contracts pay, with one major difference.

"They'll actually play," Huyghue says. "We don't have to pay the guys a lot. For 20 percent of the cost, we can provide 80 percent of the value.

"People are going to be pleasantly surprised at how good these players are. These lesser-known players are going to provide the same caliber of play."

For that to happen, the UFL will have to lean on its four head coaches, three of whom are former NFL head coaches: Green, Jim Haslett in Orlando, Jim Fassel in Las Vegas, and former San Diego Chargers defensive coordinator Ted Cottrell in New York. Not only will those men have to coach a group of players who have never played together, but they'll also serve as the face of their respective teams. And for all the extra work, coaches don't make NFL money, either.

"There's nothing that's going to pay a coach like the National Football League," Green says. "That's just the way it is."

Green says he made the decision to join the UFL's San Francisco franchise -- none of the teams has yet been assigned a mascot -- and leave retirement because he believes in the new league's vision. And it didn't hurt that he could assemble a team from his vacation cabin.

Before joining the league, Green was spending some days on a fishing boat off the San Diego coast, others in meetings as a motivational speaker and business consultant. That was life after football for Green, and he learned a thing or two about the financial models that work. Green says the UFL's plan is sound, and where past leagues -- the USFL, XFL and the Arena Football League -- failed or are failing, the UFL has primed itself to hang around.

Green says that's all the UFL wants to do -- for now. And if the NFL is somehow unable to reach a labor agreement next year -- the collective-bargaining agreement between the league and players' association is set to expire -- and a much-dreaded work stoppage sets in, guess which league will still be kicking off on Thursdays. Green says he isn't hoping for a prolonged labor disagreement. But in case there is one ...

"We offer alternative football," Green says.

When the numbers were crunched, and the expansion plan was pitched -- the league plans to add at least two teams in 2010, in Los Angeles and Hartford, Conn., with other locations under consideration -- Green says he stopped caring about catching sea bass and began thinking about discovering the next untapped football star, the player who has everything working for him but the gift of opportunity.

"I've always believed in the Kurt Warners of the world," Green says.

Huyghue says he has no delusions that NFL fans will abandon the flagship league in favor of the UFL. Instead, the commissioner says he prefers to target fans who consider a night with no televised football a wasted opportunity, a city without a football team a ghost town.

"I don't know if the country needs more football," he says, "but there are enough football players. This is another opportunity for the players who deserve it and for cities that have a demand for a team."

For now, anyway, Huyghue says there will be no bidding wars for NFL stars -- though he said the UFL would consider giving Michael Vick a place to play and transition back into the NFL. Even if landing a famous face would place the league on the credibility superhighway, the cost, Huyghue says, would crumble the very budget the UFL has built its foundation on.

If a UFL player emerges as a star and an NFL team is waiting with a fat contract to poach that player's services after the UFL season ends Nov. 28, Huyghue says he won't take that as a slight because, well, being the NFL's little brother might not be so bad, after all. And where past leagues tried to kick the NFL in the shins, the UFL wants to work shoulder-to-shoulder with one of the world's most powerful sports leagues.

"We're sharing," Huyghue says. "There's an abundance of talented players that there's just not room for [in the NFL].

"At the end of our season, I think you're going to see a bunch of our players go up to NFL rosters. We're just helping to determine what they haven't been able to determine."

Training camp begins in September, and games begin three weeks later. Green says he can hardly wait to hit the computer each day to find out what's next for America's latest upstart football league.