Colorado Springs will host a new professional sports team in 2027. The Colorado Stampede, an American football team competing in the United Football League (UFL), will be playing at Weidner Field, home of the Colorado Springs Switchbacks soccer team.
The Stampede, playing in “Bison Brown, Canyon Red, Gold Rush, and Summit White,” will be Colorado Springs’ first-ever professional football team. The team has already drummed up local interest, with thousands of season tickets already sold. If the Stampede is a success, it will be a promising sign that the UFL’s expansion into Colorado Springs is another major step in its current reorganization.
The UFL has only been around for two years, but has already faced a number of team closures and relocations. Spring football is a notoriously challenging sport to make profitable, and the league itself was born out of a merger between two doomed spring leagues in the early 2020s — the XFL and the United States Football League (USFL). It has been anything but stable: in the two years since the UFL was created, five teams have already folded.
The two teams that folded this offseason had their rosters moved around to other teams; the Stampede’s coaching staff and roster came directly from the Dallas Renegades, who in turn absorbed the roster of the folded Houston Gamblers. The Rhode Island Breakers, the other expansion team, acquired their roster from the Birmingham Stallions, who also folded.
So what should we expect from the roster? In the 10-game 2026 regular season, the Renegades went 4-6, missing out on the playoffs by one game. Head coach Rick Neuheisel, former coach of the University of Colorado Buffaloes in the late 1990s, will look to build on that and make the playoffs in the Stampede’s debut season.
There are some interesting names on the roster, too. Wide receiver Emmanuel Butler was the league leader in receiving touchdowns last season, while fellow receiver Greg Ward was a Super Bowl LII Champion with the Philadelphia Eagles. Another intriguing player is defensive end Taco Charlton, a former first-round draft pick for the Dallas Cowboys. Charlton never quite lived up to his original promise in the NFL, but could be a key player for the Stampede.
There are still some holes to fill on the roster, but the team is coming together. And off the field, things are looking up too. Both of the new expansion teams, if they can hit the ground running, provide a template for a successful future for the UFL at large. The league has begun to pivot towards smaller stadiums in overlooked markets, rejecting the half-empty bowls in existing NFL cities that have tanked spring football in the past. Will this new strategy work? The early signs are promising, but it’s hard to know until kickoff.