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Too much wrestling, too much hype, not enough good football are seen as the biggest reasons for the flop.
By BRUCE LOWITT
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 13, 2001
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." -- columnist H. L. Mencken.
"NBC did it. They're not not going to go broke, but they deserve to." -- columnist George Will.
Presenting the XFL.
You've seen it, haven't you?
Umm, probably not, if the ratings are accurate.
"The braintrusts that create the USFLs, the WFLs and now the XFL think that because the Super Bowl comes and goes, people don't know what to do the next weekend," said Chet Simmons, the former president of NBC Sports who became the USFL's first commissioner. "I think we've proven that they don't really care that much.
"If the next week the NFL came back and started another season, that'd be different because (fans) would know they're getting quality and everything that goes with first-class, top-notch sports on television. But just to fill the air time with what they call football, I don't think it's enough."
The XFL, brainchild of WWF guru Vince McMahon, is owned jointly by NBC and World Wrestling Federation Entertainment Inc. And therein might be another reason this latest spring football league seems to be on the ropes, so to speak.
"I'm no expert on wrestling," said Lamar Hunt, founder of the American Football League, which went head to head with the NFL from 1960 until the leagues agreed in 1966 to a merger in 1970. "But I had the impression, especially from the first couple of (XFL) games that I watched at length, that they were almost promoting it as a wrestling show. That probably didn't make sense to some people. I think football fans didn't react well to that."
Fans? What fans?
Oh, they were there in force -- briefly.
For the Feb. 3 premiere, NBC drew a 10.5 overnight rating, meaning an estimated 10,731,000 households watched.
"It turns out you can get a pretty good rating just out of curiosity for one night, which they did," Will said. "But if the product doesn't satisfy, it doesn't work, no matter how much marketing you do. Remember, the Edsel had all the marketing power of the Ford Motor Co. behind it, and it sank like a stone."
Sort of like the XFL's TV viewership.
NBC's weekly overnight ratings went from 10.5 to 4.6 the second week and continued plunging to a season-worst 1.7 for the final two weeks of the regular season -- believed to be among the worst overnight prime-time ratings for the so-called "big three" networks in Nielsen history. Neither the league nor the network expected anything this bad.
"There are some things that quite frankly we were unprepared for," XFL president Basil DeVito said. "We didn't do everything well out of the gate."
And Bob Reardon, league vice president of sales, said early in the season when Honda Motor Co. withdrew its advertising: "This has been a more precipitous decline than we had estimated."
Sports agent Leigh Steinberg, who has no XFL players as clients, said the league was "overpromoted to the point that the expectation level could never ever have filled the promotion level. It kept talking about the "sissified' NFL. It was promoted as the second coming and we expected the XFL to explode off the field. We expected unbelievable mayhem."
At one point the league tried to fabricate a feud between Hitmen coach Rusty Tillman and wrestler-turned-Minnesota governor (and XFL broadcaster) Jesse Ventura, except Tillman didn't go along with it.
Most fans, Steinberg said, would have been content to watch a decent game if it was accompanied by what he called "an Academy Award-winning show on the field. But it wasn't very good football, so they turned away quickly. And (NBC and the XFL) didn't do a very good job of building around the interesting players, the personalities in that league."
Steinberg said the existence of ESPN, ESPN2, Fox Sports Net and similar cable networks "has shown clearly that most men would rather watch mediocre sports than great something else" and that there is a niche for the XFL.
Will scoffed at that, saying: "This is a welcome example that there are some things you can't sell to Americans, even today, and one of them is bush-league football."
Ripping the NFL as not being rough enough didn't help. "They spent so much time and so much money bashing the NFL, telling everyone how bad it is, that they forgot they had to play football," said Hall of Fame Raiders guard Gene Upshaw, head of the NFL players union. "When you get through all the hype it still comes down to the game. ... The XFL is the best infomercial the NFL could ever have." Hunt, owner of the NFL's Kansas City Chiefs, acknowledged "there are a lot of problems in starting any sports venture. It takes time." The WFL in the '70s and USFL in the '80s ran out of time and money and folded within a few years. And NBC may soon decide it has spent enough time and money on the XFL.
"We have a two-year commitment," NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol said last month, "but it's going to have to show a marked swing in the ratings in (this weekend's) post-season for it to have a real shot beyond this year . . ."
Said Simmons: "I would be very surprised if NBC came back (for a second prime-time season). I think they're better off paying the money and doing a different schedule. I know the prime-time scheduling guys aren't going to stand for it and neither are the stations."
-- Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.