left the Bears 15 years earlier. He angrily rejected Allen's overtures and hired his old friend and former player Mike Ditka instead. Allen had a brief flirtation with the Canadian Football League when he was hired by the Montreal Alouettes as president and chief operating manager on February 19, 1982. Allen also agreed to purchase 20 percent of the team, with an option to become the majority shareholder. However, three months later, Allen resigned after continued financial troubles and a shift in majority ownership from Nelson Skalbania to Harry Ornest soured Allen on the situation. On June 21 of that same year, Allen became part-owner, chairman and head coach of the Chicago Blitz of the fledgling United States Football League, returning to the city where he had established his NFL coaching credentials two decades earlier. In his first season in 1983, the Blitz were tabbed as the early favorite to capture the league's inaugural title, in part because Allen assembled a roster laden with NFL veterans. The team finished in a tie for first with the Michigan Panthers with a 12–6 record, but the team lost the tiebreaker, making them the wild card team. In their playoff game against the Philadelphia Stars, the Blitz held a commanding 38–17 lead before a late comeback sent the game into overtime, where Chicago lost by a 44–38 score. Two months after that collapse, the Blitz were part of a bizarre transaction in which the entire franchise was essentially traded for the Arizona Wranglers. Blitz owner Ted Diethrich was disgusted at the team's lackluster attendance figures. Looking for a way out, he found it when Wranglers owner Jim Joseph decided to get out after suffering massive losses of his own. The Diethrich/Allen group sold the Blitz to James Hoffman, then bought the Wranglers from Joseph. Diethrich and Hoffman then engineered a swap of assets that resulted in the 1983 Blitz roster moving virtually en masse to Arizona, while nearly all of the 1983 Wranglers moved to Chicago. Allen, who retained his posts as part-owner, chairman, and head coach, was thus able to retain much of the core of a roster that had been considered NFL-caliber. During that 1984 season, Allen's Wranglers struggled early before finishing with a 10–8 mark, earning another wild card spot. In the opening round of the playoffs, Arizona staged a comeback to knock off the Houston Gamblers, 17–16. The following