Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
The XFL thinks its brutal, dumbed-down product is what fans want. Actually, fans want more scoring and fewer commercials.
Feb 7, 2001 | The ancient Greeks believed that time was cyclical and that everything eventually came back around. (Aristotle believed he was living in the time of the Iliad because Alexander was invading Persia, or something like that.) If you follow sports, you begin to feel the same way. Is the XFL the third or fourth attempt to establish a new pro football league?
I'm really not old enough to remember much about the beginning of the AFL except that it caused a big fuss in Alabama (and presumably elsewhere in the country) when Joe Namath signed for the then-astonishing sum of $400,000. (And did I say astonishing? That was probably the salary for both XFL teams in the league's first game Saturday.) I also remember a World Football League and a United States Football League and some other football league and even an American division of the Canadian Football League, though I can't actually say I remember anything as specific as one of their games. What I remember best is that each time around the new league promised a new excitement that the old, boring NFL was no longer providing, and that that had something to do with playing "football the way it's supposed to be played."
In the case of the new XFL, this is supposed to be what founder or commissioner or whatever-the-hell-he-is Vince McMahon calls "smashmouth football." The problem with this, as Mike Lupica (to give credit where it is due) pointed out Sunday morning, is that smashmouth football is exactly what the Baltimore Ravens played to perfection in the Super Bowl, and outside of Maryland people weren't particularly thrilled about it.
Forgetting for a moment the cheerleaders in the stands (I'll never forget one Betty Doll with an idiotic grin on her face asking a fan if he thought "another player might go down" after someone had suffered a concussion) or the "candid" player interviews (where one player was so candid he ignored the interviewer) and the halftime locker room visits (which confirmed exactly what you thought about halftime locker rooms sessions, namely that nothing of importance is ever said), I am left wondering, after the XFL's month-long media blitz, whether the people that put it together really care about football as anything besides marketing fodder.
That they don't care about the players was brought home with a jolt on Saturday that had to cause a modicum of queasiness in the most dedicated wrestling fan. A quarterback who probably shouldn't have been playing in the first place was blindsided by a tackler who'd run right past a blocker who seemed unaware that he had blown an assignment, or even that there was an assignment to blow. Anyhow, the poor jerk was sitting on the bench, injured and looking like he wished he was back at the post office or wherever while that moron Jesse Ventura, who knows as much about football as I do about governing Minnesota (or even as much as he does about governing Minnesota), berated his play and called him a quitter. Have sports fans, I wondered, become so crass that they want to see players hurt and humiliated?
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