Tag: XFL

Okay, the XFL season starts this weekend. I’m not convinced, but I am curious. MSNBC has a lot of good information about the league (couldn’t have anything to do with NBC’s part ownership of the XLF, could it?) but they hide it all in stupid pop-up boxes.

One of the things I had trouble finding, for example, is exactly how the XFL rules will differ from NFL. The main differences turn out to be,

• No “in the grasp” rule — the NFL protects quarterbacks by blowing whistles and ruling them down before somebody smashes them to the ground. In the XFL, quarterbacks are fair game, period. I was unable to find out whether there is an intentional grounding rule, but I’m assuming there is. I don’t have a lot of opinion about this rule except that while fans might like watching quarterbacks get slammed to the ground, I doubt they’re going to like watching their team have a different quarterback every other week. How will the XFL build any fan base or team loyalty with the revolving door situation that’s going to develop with lots of injured quarterbacks?
• All punts over 25 yards result in a “free” ball — once a punt travels 25 yards, it can be recovered by either team. In the NFL, punts can only be recovered by the kicking team if it first touches a member of the receiving team. This would be pointless if it weren’t for the next rule.
• There are no fair catches — in the NFL a player receiving a punt can call for a fair catch. Basically this is a promise by the player not to return the ball any further in exchange for the defense promising not to smack the living daylights out of him. In the XFL you can’t do that — if you’re going to field the punt, you’re going to risk getting smacked. This will certainly be the most controversial XFL rule and the one where something is most likely to cause serious injury. Take a special teams player weighing 220 pounds running at full speed and then smack into some moron rendered defenseless while he’s trying to field a punt, and the result is a potentially lethal collision. It’s this sort of rule that really crosses the line and makes critics question the legitimacy of the XFL as a sport as opposed to a simple excuse for WWF-style mayhem.
• No kicking Point After Touchdowns — this, on the other hand, is a rule the NFL should adopt. The kicking game is the most annoying part of football. In the XFL you can’t kick the extra point, but instead have to run a play, probably from the 5 yard-line or so, and punch the ball into the end zone.

In a few months the XFL — the WWF/NBC football league — will kick off what Vince McMahon calls a return to “smashmouth football.” If you believe McMahon, the National Football League is populated by whimps who are scared to death to get hit.

I don’t know which channel McMahon is watching, but I see NFL plays every weekend that I’m surprised somebody isn’t outright killed. Take a bunch of men that big and that fast and put them on opposite sides of a football field and it as Rich Gannon once put it, it’s like watching a car crash.

FeedMag.Com’s Ben Godar really hits the nail on the head on this point,

There’s a reason that pro football plays don’t look as aggressively confrontational as they used to, and it’s not because the game is going soft, but just the opposite: Players today are stronger, larger, and faster than ever before.

…Fifteen years ago there were only around twenty players over three hundred pounds. Today that number is well over a hundred.

Anybody else remember when the Chicago Bear’s Refrigerator Perry was considered a freak and somewhat of a sideshow because of his size?

On the other hand, I enjoy football for precisely the same reason that Godar does, which also happens to be why McMahon despises the modern game — there is as much thinking and creativity in today’s game as there is brute force.

Complex traps, counters, and screen passes have become the mainstay of an effective running game. Winning football has become as much cerebral as physical.

Anybody with the physical size can play “smashmouth” football, but to run the sort of stunts that a defense such as Tampa Bay runs requires a great deal of skill and intelligence that many players lack.

There are a lot of good athletes in the Arena Football League, and that league emphasizes high scoring, basic football. And for the most part it’s extremely boring — almost like a caricature of real football. I suspect that the XFL will find the same problem.

Personally, since they are going to spend a lot of money on it anyway, I’d prefer McMahon and NBC to take the XFL in the direction that sports writers seem to fear most — make it into a completely fake sports opera. Better yet, abandon the whole football schtick, invent a sport that involves a lot of violence, and build a fake league around that.

An enormous part of the appeal of sports are the goings on outside the lines, and a well-managed sports soap opera might actually succeed. If forced to compete on its merits as a legitimate sporting event, however, I doubt the XFL will have what it takes.

Source:

Feed daily. Ben Godar, FeedMag.Com, November 16, 2000.