Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Wrestling impresario Vince McMahon and NBC have teamed up for an ultrarough new football league. They're gonna get sacked.
Feb 1, 2001 | When the XFL kicks off its first season Saturday night on NBC, the wildly hyped, trash-talking sports start-up backed by Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation will try to do what no other challenger to the NFL has been able to do: survive on its own.
McMahon remade so-called pro wrestling into a billion-dollar money-minting operation, turning the crotch-grabbing, babe-gawking WWF wrestling into every teenage boy's fantasy (and every junior high school teacher's nightmare). Backers are banking on McMahon and the renegade XFL's ability to tap into that same maverick vibe and create a franchise for the ages.
McMahon and the involvement of NBC -- on board as a deep-pocketed partner, guaranteeing an instant, prime-time media exposure no other start-up league has ever enjoyed -- have given the XFL an enviable credibility. That's something some previous failed football leagues -- the World Football League and the USFL -- have lacked.
Since the league's announcement last March, McMahon has been earning his P.T. Barnum stripes, crowing about how the XFL will, alternately, change football, change sports or change television. So far his shtick seems to be working.
The new league's debut is a three-hour broadcast Saturday, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern time; a team called the New York/New Jersey Hitmen is playing the Las Vegas Outlaws; to hedge its bets, NBC is also broadcasting footage from another game, the Chicago Enforcers against the Orlando Rage.
While some cranky sportswriters belittle the new league, the XFL has received mostly fawning coverage from the star-struck consumer press. Having never seen the product, the media has been taking McMahon and NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol at their word and willingly going along for the ride.
Newsweek gave McMahon's brainchild a wet kiss in the form of a two-page spread, complete with the XFL-endorsed headline, "Not Your Father's NFL." The magazine gushed, "The early buzz is strong, thanks to a popular Web site and a witty 'Gladiator'-style ad campaign." The writer went on, "Viewers raised on MTV will feel right at home tuning in to the XFL. The NBC telecasts will feature more cameras than Michael Douglas' wedding, with key combatants miked to amplify every grunt and taunt."
McMahon and Ebersol couldn't have scripted it better themselves. Problem is, as both a professional sports entity and prime-time television product, the XFL is built off flawed blueprints and is doomed to fail.
McMahon insists that while soap-opera story lines off the field may be tarted up, the action between the goalposts will be legit, and there's no reason to disbelieve him. Convincing skeptics they're playing real ball, though, is the least of the XFL's worries.
More pressing is the fact that the league has been built around the hollow premise that fans resent the NFL's allegedly stodgy brand of ho-hum games, played by pampered stars.
Record NFL attendance and profits suggest otherwise. The XFL brain trust insists that by eliminating the fair catch on punts, and introducing supposedly new elements like sexy cheerleaders (has the XFL never seen the Dallas Cowboys' sideline squad?), and letting their players unleash their "attitude" (has the XFL never seen an Oakland Raiders game?), it will find a profitable niche.
But that doesn't mask the real challenge:
The XFL is the wrong league broadcasting on the wrong night of the week.
Make no mistake, the XFL is a pure TV play. The league's own plans envision just 20,000 to 30,000 fans buying bargain-basement tickets for each game. (Would you sit in Chicago's frigid Soldier Field for a night game in February?) The XFL will live or die on its TV ratings.
The problem is the night NBC has set aside for the new franchise. In order to succeed, the XFL has to change the social habits of millions of young sports fans by getting them to stay home on Saturday night.
Talk about a Hail Mary pass. "Traditionally, Saturday night has been a graveyard," explains John Lombardo, who covers football for Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal. "It's the black hole for prime time."
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The numbers do not lie. After initially assuring Madison Avenue that XFL's prime-time Saturday-evening games could garner a 5.5 rating, the league backed off, scaling the guarantee back to 4.5 for Saturday night.
A ratings point is equal to a bit more than 1 million viewers. Desperate for advertisers, the XFL is charging just $60,000 for a 30-second spot; the U.S. Army is the biggest taker to date.
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