Tag: XFL

Ratings for the XFL were so bad that Vince McMahon couldn’t convince even bottom feeder UPN to a decent deal to air games next season (then again, maybe UPN just doesn’t have any money left after shelling out such ridiculous sums for Buffy).

So, it’s official — the league is dead.

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.

Finally it happened — the XFL went where no sports broadcast (or any other broadcast) had gone before. Saturday night’s game between the Orlando Rage and the Los Angeles Xtreme was apparently the lowest rated prime time show in television history.

Game 3 of the 2000 Stanley Cup finals was the previous marker of futility, garnering only a 2.3 share. Overnight ratings suggest the XFL broadcast could beat that soundly with a 2.1 share.

Vince McMahon still keeps saying the league is going to be a success in the long term, but NBC will almost certainly bail on the experiment sooner rather than later. Meanwhile WWF stock is down 35 percent since the league’s debut.

Several stories today reported that the XFL managed to halt is ratings slide this week — ratings for Saturday’s game were up to a 2.8. Unfortunately a) that’s still a lousy rating, and b) as USA Today’s Rudy Martzke points out, now the XFL is going to have to deal with competition from March Madness.

I watched half of a game on TNN on Sunday, and they have substantially improved the quality of their broadcasts — that and some nice trick play execution made the game pretty lively — but it’s almost certainly too late to rescue the drowning league.

I’d be very surprised if NBC doesn’t bail out of the XFL altogether. Vince McMahon will probably consider himself lucky if he can convince the network to simply switch the games from their current prime time slot to a daytime Saturday slot (which would make more sense, but probably wouldn’t do much to prevent the XFL from disappearing at the end of its second season at the latest).

Yet another hilarious article from The Onion, this time parodying the XFL. Vince McMahon’s X-Span Promises Bone-Crunching Legislative Coverage.

All your ratings are belong to us.

Okay, I wasn’t all that thrilled with the XFL after a few weeks of watching it, but the football wasn’t that bad given the talent pool the league had to work with. Plus the broadcasts had gotten better, with some of the more annoying aspects of the original broadcast pared down or eliminated altogether. Not that it had much of a future. As a USA Today columnist put it, but the time the XFL reached its third week and was displaying some watchable football, the true football fans had already stopped watching because of the outrageous antics while the WWF fans had stopped watching because the on-field action was too tame. The only people left watching the XFL were older men who didn’t have anything else to do on Saturday nights.

The ratings tell it all — the only thing standing between the XFL and an all-time low rating for a program in prime time is a hockey playoff game broadcast on Fox a few years ago (which might say a lot more about hockey than the XFL).

But the cardinal sin that will keep me from watching anymore was learning that Vince McMahon and Dick Ebersol decided to do some tinkering with the game to rig the outcome more toward their liking. Specifically, beginning with this week’s games, the XFL simply changed its rules about receiver coverage. In the first four weeks, defensive players were allowed to bump and run to their hearts delight, and XFL viewers were told that only sissy NFL receivers afraid of a little contact needed such protection.

Which I completely agree with, but allowing defenders to make contact with the receivers down field makes it a lot hard to complete long passes, especially spectacular touchdown throws. After watching its teams score relatively few points, McMahon said enough is enough and simply changed the rule.

It is bad enough that rules change from season to season with regularity in the National Football League, which among other things makes it impossible to compare teams from one year to the next since they’re often playing almost completely different games (baseball is the one sport that’s done the best to avoid this). But changing the rules in the middle of a season simply to boost scoring is ridiculous and, to my mind, removes any remaining possibility that the XFL might have somehow managed to escape all the hype and emerge as a legitimate off-season football league to complement the NFL.