Well, technically the XFL isn’t dead yet, but since it is about to be kicked off NBC, it might as well be. The Wall Street Journal published an interesting post mortem on what went wrong.
Ultimately, the central problem with the XFL was ironically what Vince McMahon promised was his main mission — a lack of focus on the game of football itself. Although McMahon was often over the top (duh!), some of his criticism of the NFL weren’t too far off the mark.
But all the XFL did was shift the problem. Rather than whining players and stultifying rules that distract from the NFL game sometimes, McMahon offered sex, gimmicky and contrived off-the-field controversies (such as Jesse Ventura’s needling of coaches), and more sex in case viewers missed it the first time around.
The XFL was even further from McMahon’s idealized professional football of the 1950s and 1960s than the NFL ever was.