The word rang through the earpieces of St. Louis Battlehawk helmets and headsets quite often, and with the blunt force of an axe. “Solo.” Solo meant good. Solo meant audible, if coming from the mouth of offensive coordinator A.J. Smith. Solo meant that an opposing defense had decided to throw a cornerback straight up in one-on-one coverage against receiver Hakeem Butler.
Solo meant, in four letters, that Smith’s quarterback should abandon any other read in favor of turning and throwing the ball to Butler.
“That,” Smith recalled, chuckling, “was our entire offense.”
It worked out well enough for the United Football League’s Battlehawks in 2026 because the 30-year-old Butler stands 6-foot-6, weighs around 227 pounds, and ran fast enough — — to warp any matchup against a UFL defense that dared to try him straight up. It was good enough to hand him the league’s Offensive Most Valuable Player this spring, for the second time in his career. It was good enough to land him on the radar of the Denver Broncos, who signed him in June to compete in training camp.
It has never been good enough, though, to give Butler a single NFL catch, a no-man’s-land journey through eight professional seasons that has mystified his coaches.
“I’m like, man, if he doesn’t get at least to camp – I’m like, man, this guy’s unbelievable,” Smith said. “Because he’s got stuff you can’t coach.”
Leaning into developing NFL prospects
The Broncos have now become the sixth NFL franchise to take a flier on Butler, furthering a roster-building trend that’s become a clear part of the organization’s summer plans. In each of the last four seasons, Denver general manager George Paton and his front office have signed at least one player from the UFL (formerly XFL and USFL) in June or July: practice-squad receiver Michael Bandy in 2023, key reserve OLB Dondrea Tillman in 2024, long-waived cornerback Mario Goodrich in 2025, and now Butler and cornerback Sean Fresch in 2026.
“Itap almost like — without sitting in that room, they’re saving a certain number of spots for those guys,” said Battlehawks defensive coordinator Corey Chamblin, who coached Tillman with the Birmingham Stallions in 2024.
Perhaps they are. Bandy and Tillman, as two organizational mainstays, have now given the Broncos two points of credibility for evaluating UFL talent. In June, Broncos head coach Sean Payton told reporters he’d asked team scouts whether they were finding better players in the still-fresh UFL or the long-standing CFL; judging by his comments, they clearly pointed to the former.
“I think it’s kind of becoming that, ‘OK, where’s the next market?'” Payton said in mid-June. “They’re getting developed somewhere. Where are they if they’re not in our league? I think to their league’s credit, it’s helping us.”
This has become the UFL’s stated goal after billionaire Mike Repole . , 23 players signed NFL contracts after the league’s season ended this June, up from 10 at the same time in 2025. Last year, the league in favor of a centralized scouting model, placing team personnel responsibilities in the hands of individual head coaches and the league-wide player pool in the hands of an office helmed by former Buffalo Bills GM Doug Whaley.
The overall goal, as Whaley explained, is to get a wider variety of scouting looks to increase the talent pool, and thereby increase the UFL’s potential as a self-proclaimed “developmental league.”
“We’re leaning into it,” Whaley told The Denver Post. “Our coaches are leaning into it, our scouts are leaning into it, and the whole organization. The more we can have players, coaches, support staff make that jump to the NFL, thatap exactly — that gives us great joy.”
Making the leap
One crop of players league-wide is in the Butler bucket: a 2019 fourth-round NFL Draft pick out of Iowa State who has consistently used UFL tape to try and leverage a foothold back to the NFL. The other crop is in the Fresch bucket, a cornerback who had one single rookie minicamp tryout as an undrafted cornerback from Rice in 2024 and has not been in the NFL since. The modern UFL, in player acquisition, has increasingly targeted the latter camp — in trying to establish a sort of year-round cycle between NFL and UFL roster movement.
Once NFL training camps begin in late July, Whaley and his staff assemble and rank a hot board of sixth-round, seventh-round and undrafted free agents on 90-man rosters leaguewide. At the end of the NFL season in the winter, Whaley explained, he and UFL scouts begin contacting those on that hot board — usually moored on practice squads — and deliver a pitch.
It’s simple enough. The best hope for players on the fringes of NFL rosters is generally to sign a futures contract, which often keeps them in a team’s building for months with few reps before being cut amid free agency and NFL Draft reshuffling between March and June. The UFL, as Whaley and his team pitch it, offers an alternative opportunity in that same window to build 10 to 12 games of game tape against professional competition and broaden exposure.
“People are understanding — most importantly, agents are understanding — this is a legitimate chance for your guy to make that leap in playing ability to really get not only a look and get signed, but be able to stick now,” Whaley said.
Take Fresch, a 5-foot-8 nickel cornerback who led the UFL in punt-return yardage in 2026 and suddenly had four NFL teams reach out to agent Joe Flanagan for workouts after the season. AFC contenders like Buffalo and Houston came calling; Denver won out, and Fresch won a contract.
The alternative to a three-month UFL season? Fresch could’ve sat and opted for a veteran tryout during an NFL minicamp in May.
“Thatap like hoping for good numbers in the Powerball, man,” Flanagan told The Denver Post. “That (expletive) doesn’t work.”
This informal UFL-to-NFL aspirational system, though, is far from perfect. Both Smith and Chamblin noted that the UFL’s current schedule isn’t always conducive to landing players on NFL offseason rosters, since the UFL’s season runs through most NFL teams’ summer offseason program and OTAs.
“It’s all the UFL’s fault,” Smith said.
Whaley told The Post the UFL is exploring avenues to shift its schedule to align with the NFL programming in May. Those conversations are complicated, though, as the UFL is currently subject to the whims of venue availability — many UFL games are played in Major League Soccer stadiums — and television programming in a partnership with FOX Sports and ESPN.
“If we had our choice,” Whaley said, “we’d like to move it up so these guys can get in in the (NFL) offseason program and be able to get their feet settled.”
For now, though, the Broncos are still on the crest of a wave among NFL front offices that have demonstrated investment in current UFL development. And agents — often the conduit for UFL-to-NFL exposure — know it.
“It takes a specific mindset to say, like, ‘We’re going to churn our roster a little bit in May and June to get a better player thatap an upgrade over the guys we’ve seen in shorts all spring and early summer,'” Flanagan said. “I think thatap definitely a Broncos mindset, at this point.”
