THERE AREN’T MANY WWE FANS, OR SPORTS FANS IN GENERAL, WHO HAVEN’T HEARD OF THE FAILED VENTURE OF VINCE MCMAHON THAT WAS THE XFL.
Widely regarded as a hilarious punchline as to how badly McMahon can fail, the XFL actually had a lot of promise surrounding it upon it’s release, which a lot of people have forgotten about.
The promotion had everything going against it, and despite such huge setbacks, it managed some major victories and to this day, the NFL has been used techniques that the XFL introduced to the world. To start off, McMahon announced the XFL would be starting up in February 2000, and that their first televised game on NBC Sports would be aired exactly one year later. To be clear, McMahon gave himself one year to find venues, players, coaches, team names, cheerleaders, an announce team and so much more. That’s a lot of work for anybody to do, and it was practically unheard of, but Vince McMahon being the idealist, knew that he could pull it off, and he did.
One year later, the XFL had it’s first official game and opened up with 54 million viewers on prime time Saturday night television. They had initially imagined it would be half of what they ended up achieving. However, with success, comes envy.
The league had obviously had to draft players that weren’t good enough for the NFL, so the quality of football was low to start off with at best. They also featured all of the gratuitous violence and sex appeal that the WWE did. To mainstream media, this was an absolute travesty and a mockery of what they usually featured on a major network such as NBC for prime time television. The media had a field day with their coverage of the XFL, and critics largely slammed it. The next week, everything that could have gone wrong for the XFL, did.
Viewers had dipped due to the low quality of football in the initial televised game, along with the media campaign against it. However, just as it looked like game two of the season was picking up, they lost power. Somebody had forgotten to fill the generators with gasoline, so the live feed went dead, as did the XFL’s hopes for being a success. NBC featured roughly two minutes of dead air footage, and most of the people who were still watching, switched the channel fairly rapidly. This saw ratings drop by 50%. It never really recovered from that, and by the end of the first season, the XFL’s ratings had dropped from a 10.5 on the Nielsen scale, to a 1.7. Vince promised a second season, but without NBC backing them, that promise was never fulfilled.
Fast forward 16 years to 2017 and there are rumblings of Vince toying with the idea of bringing the XFL back. To say this would be a waste of time and money would be an understatement. If it comes back and does work, I will put myself on Youtube eating my article, but the initial premise of the XFL was to be bolder, brasher, more violent than the NFL. We have since seen some damning statistics about the rate of brain damage in correlation to having a career in the NFL, so what would be the new premise of the XFL? It can’t claim to be more violent as that would be wildly careless towards it’s employees. Also it wouldn’t even work side by side with WWE’s standards, who make sure that all of their superstars are in good enough shape to compete – just look at Daniel Bryan and how he can’t wrestle any more because of scares over the amount of concussions he’s had.
So let’s focus on the bolder and brasher side of things. Once again standards have largely changed since 2001, and using tactics such as getting a camera into the cheerleaders’ locker room wouldn’t be seen in very high regard, which was one of the plot points to boost the XFL’s flagging ratings back in the day.
So we’ve ruled out the violence, and the sex appeal. The biggest question is this: what would the new XFL offer the public that the NFL doesn’t already provide? Don’t get me wrong, I can 100% guarantee that Vince McMahon would think of something. Let’s not forget the XFL introduced sky cams and putting microphones on the players, something which the NFL features prominently to this day.
The NFL is currently suffering sliding ratings, and has been for the past couple of years. There are numerous reasons as to why this may be happening. Just like WWE post Attitude Era, the NFL has introduced rule changes in order to prevent players head injuries – good for employees, bad for ratings. Honestly it makes you wonder if people would still go to Roman coliseums to see a man fighting six lions with nothing but a hedge trimmer to see if he survives. (Spoiler: he doesn’t.)
Also there are obviously features from the media regarding domestic violence issues with players in the league, or the famous national anthem protests. If Vince McMahon ever wanted to try one last time, then sure, this would be the time.
Who knows what the future holds, maybe the new XFL would be the first sports venture to be primarily shown on a non-TV brand, such as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix etc. There’s always a chance with whatever McMahon creates that he can be successful, as he is that type of character, but if he is bringing back the XFL, it would need to be a wildly different variant on what he produced back in 2001.
