XFL Football League: A failed experiment in sports entertainment
What happens when American football meets professional wrestling? Well the chairman of the board of the WWE, Vince McMahon tried to show us all what a marriage of the two sports might be. He started a new American football league called the XFL. It was supposed
to be a rival league to the NFL but alas, it never took off and was cancelled after only one season. It was a classic case of a sports league that ended before it even got a chance to start. XFL is a joke today and is synonymous with any sort of venture that
fails miserably.
With the WWE booming in popularity and raking in the big bucks for the chairman of its board, Vince McMahon decided he wanted to branch out into other sports. Having been an American football fan, he decided to launch a competitor league to the NFL. But
he simply did not want it to be just another football league; he wanted it to be something new and innovative. He came up with an idea to try and combine some elements of wrestling into American football; the result was the XFL. It was a new football league
that was launched in 2000 with a lot of hype and fanfare. XFL was supposed to appeal to fans of both wrestling and football by being a little bit different from the regular football that the fans were used to and also featuring action and game play that was
a little bit rougher than the NFL.
XFL football league was launched in 2000 and immediately generated a huge buzz. It was created to be a single entity league and all the teams were meant to be owned by the league as opposed to the NFL where teams are privately owned. There were some other
differences with the NFL such as it was supposed to be real football without penalties and fewer rules. The games featured coaches with microphones, scantily clad cheerleaders and cameras in the huddles and a special overhead camera called a sky cam. The games
did not have a coin toss but the ball was simply put in the middle of the pitch and one player from each team would run out to get the ball. Also the teams had names such as Rage, Enforcers and Xtreme.
The newly formed league was able to sign television deals with NBC, TNN and UPN. The very first game saw some very high viewing figures; some estimates put the viewing figure at 14 million viewers and it had an extremely high 9.5 Nielsen rating. The problem
for the league was that the next few weeks the ratings dropped suddenly by a huge amount. People stopped watching the new sport and it seemed they simply lost interest in the league. This large drop in the ratings was its biggest problem and led to the league
being cancelled after only one season.
The interesting thing to see here was why did people stop watching the new league’s matches in such large numbers. Well it seemed a lot of them associated the new league with professional wrestling where they knew the outcome of every match is predetermined
and so they thought the results of the football games were also doctored. Even though there was no evidence that this did take place, there was no changing people’s minds. The other problem with the league was that the quality of the football was not good
and it stopped interesting true football fans after a while. Yet another problem was the fact that the league used wrestling announcers who gave a play by play analysis of the game. These did not resonate with the fans even though some of them had 30 years
of experience in announcing.
Even though the league was supposed to be on air for a couple of years before it would be seen if it was viable or not by the television networks but because of the sudden drop in ratings, it was cancelled after only one season. A lot of people said that
it would have worked if it would have stayed on air, people would have realised that the results were not fixed and the quality of the football and the announcing would have improved. But sadly the fledgling league was not even given a chance to make a name
for itself and find some fans. It is interesting but we have to wonder what would have happened if the league would have continued but now we will never know.
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