Per ESPN XFL heads to the history books finished

[single wing]

SportsCenter
@SportsCenter
· 1h
Breaking: The XFL suspended operations Friday morning and laid off nearly all of its staff, multiple sources told @SeifertESPN and @FieldYates.

The league currently has no plans to return in 2021.

[lastcat3]

Not really much of a surprise. I think it was a bigger surprise that they initially said they were still planning on coming back for a 2021 season. Not being able to finish the initial season would have been a huge blow to them financially and probably just wasn't feasible for them to try it again for a second season (where interest would probably be even lower and they probably would have been at risk of losing their tv deal).

If the pandemic didn't happen they likely would have at least been able to finish the first season but as it stands this is the shortest lived league yet.

Wonder how long it will be before someone is foolish enough to try this again.

[single wing]

lastcat

Think your right.

United States Football League played 3 seasons of spring football 1983 thru 1985. After that about 25 leagues said they were starting since. Some made just announcement then folded, others named cities then folded, Others made it to the draft then folded, 3 made it to training camps then folded. Only AAF & XFL actually took the field... Suspect after what occurred with AAF & XFL it will be a long long time before anyone tries Spring football again.

[sluggermatt15]

Darn. It would have been interesting to see where the league would have gone had they finished the season. Could really get into the ratings, projections, etc. Year two might have given a more realistic picture. Sometimes it takes 2-3 years to determine what kind of following a new league may have,

[Throwin_Samoan]

Darn. It would have been interesting to see where the league would have gone had they finished the season. Could really get into the ratings, projections, etc. Year two might have given a more realistic picture. Sometimes it takes 2-3 years to determine what kind of following a new league may have,

No, you can usually tell pretty quickly. It's not often that these leagues ( a ) last two to three years or ( b ) grow their following over that time.

To channel Dennis Green a bit, they were slightly better than we thought they'd be, but what they were was what they were likely to be. They had an initial wave of interest as people sampled the product (that happens nearly always), which backed off and began to decline. Had they played all 10 games plus playoffs, they'd have likely finished somewhere south of 18k per game in average attendance, which wasn't going to pay the bills, and their TV audiences by week five were half what they were for week one.

It wasn't like nobody was watching. There's an audience for alternative football, spring or fall. That audience is simply not big enough to sustain the most expensive sport we have.

Vince McMahon was willing to sink a lot of money into this, and still has a lot of money. But if he didn't see a way forward (and we don't know that for certain, I would imagine his/their thought processes will become clearer over time as someone digs into the story) after a half-season, it makes you think horses, not zebras, as it were.

The pandemic hurt, no question. Without that, they surely finish the first season. Maybe they decide to give it a shot again in 2021 - they had actually done a lot of things right, in contrast to the first iteration (the most important one, perhaps, was not having Vince McMahon as their front man, and instead having Oliver Luck be the face). It wasn't terrible. It wasn't a stone-cold loser like the UFL or the FXFL.

But the most memorable moment from those 20 games was the beer snake in Washington. That ain't exactly promising.

[JuggernautJ]

Do we consider the USFL to have been a success? (I do. I had season tickets for the Invaders for two years.)
It lasted for years and might have continued on had someone not decided to move to the Fall and go head-to-head with the NFL.

So what made the USFL successful?
And why can't alternative leagues make it today?

[Throwin_Samoan]

Do we consider the USFL to have been a success? (I do. I had season tickets for the Invaders for two years.)
It lasted for years and might have continued on had someone not decided to move to the Fall and go head-to-head with the NFL.

So what made the USFL successful?
And why can't alternative leagues make it today?

While I *loved* the USFL and while there's no question it was the most successful post-AFL league, I cannot in good conscience call it an unqualified success. Look at the number of teams that moved, folded or were catastrophes. TV ratings dropped after the initial tune-in and while they were decent on cable, they were not coming back up on ABC. (Still, ABC had a sweetheart deal they were more than happy to stick to b/c the USFL was a really bad negotiator.) They even turned down a very good cable TV offer because they thought they could do better. (They could not, spoiler alert.)

Your Invaders averaged <24k fans per game in a league that averaged 26k, and in a market that had just lost its pro football team. Attendance at the Coliseum dropped every year, even with an exciting, championship-caliber team the last year.

The USFL lost millions upon millions of dollars, limped to the finish line in its final spring season and, no, would absolutely not still be around had they stayed in the spring, the way they were going. They were mismanaged, rife with egocentric owners who didn't know what they were doing, had a lack of leadership (Simmons was fairly weak, and Usher...well, I still don't know what they were thinking with that, because everything you read about that period screams 'Harry Usher had no business being the commissioner of anything.') and had enough outrageous facepalm stories to fill several books.

THAT SAID, it was fun as all hell. And the reason it lasted those three years, the reason it is still remembered fondly, the reason people put forth the "it coulda worked" argument (despite all the evidence to the contrary) is the answer to your last question: because they went big. They played in major markets, in major stadiums, with name coaches. They fought with the NFL for draft picks and won. They enticed NFL players to jump.

You could do that in 1983 because the average NFL salary in 1982 was...wait for it...$105,000. It's nearly $3M today. You would have to substantially outbid the NFL for a first-round draft pick or an established veteran because, the other things being relatively equal, an established veteran NFL player has no incentive to jump to an alternative league. Anyone you could get would be a distressed asset or someone for whom the market had dried up or someone who wouldn't move the needle for you anyway.

The economics of the game changed pretty drastically in the late 80s, and the stadium construction boom since then has, in a lot of cases, shut out the possibility of a competitor because many NFL teams have leases that preclude the stadium being leased to a competitor league even if it's a municipal stadium built with taxpayer money. You can't compete with that. Your alternative is to put teams in places with no NFL teams, and there are only so many San Antonios and San Diegos to go around. There are surely not enough viable markets to make a competitor league do-able.

An Alternative Football League team is not going to outbid the Bengals (that sentence has never been written before) for Joe Burrow, and if they did, there's no WAY their salary structure isn't so whacked out that they'll never do anything but lose a ton of money. (The LA Express outbid the Bengals for Steve Young, but it was a house of cards.) Replicate that throughout the league, and, barring a super TV deal (which is likely not forthcoming), it's just crazy.

Football has gotten too expensive. You can't do a bigtime NFL-competing league anymore. The market is no longer underserved (as it was in 1959) and the appetite for year-round football is actually an appetite for year-round NFL football, not just Any Old 22 Guys Chasing a Prolate Spheroid. No one grew up as a St. Louis BattleHawks fan. Take the generational aspect out of it (which takes, you know, generations to build up) and you're just looking at a situation where I'm Watching This Because It's Football. (And far fewer people were watching the XFL in Week 5 than in Week 1, and had March Madness happened, well, it would have been ugly.)

You can't make the money back. You can't shell out the startup costs, the player wage cost, the insurance costs, the equipment costs, the stadium rental costs, the travel costs, the support and front office staff costs, and ever hope to cover that nut without a silly TV contract.

THAT'S why it doesn't happen. And why it won't happen again. The USFL was it, and I loved it and I wish I could go back to the spring of 1984 and experience it all over again.

But it wasn't really "successful." It was fun. But it was a mess. A great, big, beautiful mess.

[TanksAndSpartans]

For USFL, I got to go to some Generals games as a kid - the NFL tickets seemed out of reach. What did folks think of the Small Potatoes 30 for 30? I saw it on a plane once, but can't recall much.

[single wing]

XFL files for bankruptcy


https://sports.yahoo.com/xfl-files-bank ... 53709.html

[single wing]

For USFL, I got to go to some Generals games as a kid - the NFL tickets seemed out of reach. What did folks think of the Small Potatoes 30 for 30? I saw it on a plane once, but can't recall much.

I was a season ticket holder of the Chicago Blitz for year one. Cancelled year 2 when the team was traded for the Arizona Wranglers