The title is a reference to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic. Solzhenitsyn was a Russian writer who was once imprisoned in the Gulag (the Soviet prison work camps), and then later exiled. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, based upon his novels dealing with the lives of Soviet dissidents, rather like the unfortunate Anton Baklanov here.
The USFL The United States Football League ran from 1982 to 1986. The league would play during summer/autumn where as the NFL had a long tradition of playing in Winter.