America's latest sporting venture, the XFL is ostensibly the creation of World Wrestling Federation impresario Vince McMahon, aided and abetted (and funded) by NBC television president Dick Ebersol, but its advent was accurately predicted half a century earlier. The visionary social critic Henry L. Mencken undoubtedly had the XFL in mind when he forecast, correctly, "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
The XFL claims that its target audience consists of young adult males, but given the scheduled start time for most of its games, what it really means is young adult males who can't get a date on Saturday night.
The newest "sport" to grace the US' airwaves is allegedly football, albeit packaged in the trappings of the WWF, with elements of dwarf-tossing and lap-dancing thrown into the mix.
Although it was advertised as "football for real men," with nicknames like Enforcers, Rage, Hitmen, Maniax, and Outlaws, it should be plain enough who the XFL is really aimed at: potential mass murderers.
The new league was allegedly devised to fill a void among action-sport devotees who felt abandoned by what McMahon considers the National Football League's regimented march to boredom. (And from this standpoint, the ennui produced by the Ravens and Giants in Super Bowl XXXV last month played straight into the WWF founder's hands.)
The XFL promised to deliver a speeded-up, more action-packed version of football, augmented by as much sex and violence as it could get away with before a home television audience. (Camera cuts to scantily-clad cheerleaders are often accompanied by smarmy double entendres from the announcers, among them Jesse "The Body" Ventura, the former WWF wrestler more recently elected the Governor of Minnesota.)
Rules protecting ball-carriers and, notably, quarterbacks, were dispensed with. By curtailing the time between plays to 35 seconds and limiting the half-time intermission to 10 minutes, the XFL promised to deliver games that would be played in three hours or less.
The league faced no dearth of fodder in filling its rosters. Most of the participants are former NFL and Canadian Football League players, along with a smattering of rejects from NFL Europe and the indoor Arena League.
The salary structure calls for quarterbacks to earn a base salary of $50,000 for a 10-game season, other positional players $45,000, and kickers $35,000. Players whose teams win receive an additional $2,500 per game, with a $25,000 bonus to each player on whichever team wins the XFL championship.
In keeping with its macho image, the XFL decided to dispense with the pre-game coin-toss, opting instead for a two-man scrum. The match referee throws a football out between waiting representatives from each team, who then go after it like a pair of hungry dogs fighting over a lamb chop. The winner of this little mini-drama gets to decide whether his team will kick off or receive.
In the league's first game, the representative of the Orlando Rage dispatched for this bit of gladitorial combat suffered a dislocated shoulder and was lost for the season.
On its opening weekend, the XFL pulled down a 9.5 national rating, meaning that nearly one in every 10 American television sets was tuned to the new league's games. Whatever elation Ebersol and McMahon felt after that little adrenaline rush wore off was short-lived, however: The ratings fell by half on the second weekend.
The network lost its feed from the featured match, in Los Angeles, to a power failure caused by one of those "rolling blackouts" that have been plaguing California for the last month. NBC switched to a backup game and finally got on the air with what was left of the Chicago-LA game, only to be beaten silly in the ratings war by a remake of "The Parent Trap."
Perhaps worse, one game last weekend lasted three hours and 45 minutes, thereby cutting into the scheduled start of the crown jewel of NBC's weekend programming, "Saturday Night Live" - the ground-breaking comedy-and-variety show founded a quarter-century ago by a young television executive named Dick Ebersol.
Heads, you may rest assured, will roll.
It may be a bit early to start drawing conclusions, but having watched more XFL games in the past two weeks than is healthy for a normal human being, some observations are in order.
The quality of football is awful. McMahon can call all he wants to for a faster, more exciting version of the game, but it's hard to deliver when all the faster and more exciting players are already playing in the NFL.
The drop-off in talent had not been unanticipated, but here's something he hadn't banked on: the officiating is nearly as bad.
McMahon had two choices going in. They could either play real football with real officials, or they could dress up WWF referees in zebra suits and rig the games in much the same manner he scripts his wrestling shows. By opting for the former, he may have sounded the eventual death knell for his product.
Not only are the rules variations as practiced by the XFL just confusing enough to produce endless zebra conferences between the officials, but by hiring a collection of professional officials (most of them work NCAA games during the real football season) he ensured a game that is far too much like football (albeit bad football) than anything he had envisioned.
And if the collection of rejects he's hired for his new venture could protect a quarterback without holding somebody, rest assured they'd be in the NFL and not playing for the Maniax in February.
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