Like a lot of football fans I am usually at a loss as to what the hell it is that I am supposed to do after all the college bowls, the playoffs, and finally the Super Bowl are all over with. I remember years ago that I was really excited when Vince McMahon and company decided to take on the largest, by far, American football enterprise on head on. It looked promising and we were excited. A friend of mine even hosted an XFL party. Boy were we ever disappointed.
The initial XFL season was an absolute disaster. The first game that was shown on TV was such a blowout that they ended up cutting to another game halfway through and the "up close and personal" moments with putting microphones on some of the more outlandish players was just stupid. As it turns out, you probably don't really want to know what most players are actually saying on the field. It was profoundly idiotic.
That being said, the XFL has kind of revamped and fine tuned some of the problems that they learned from in their ill-received season 1 and were actually doing quite well until Covid shut everything down in 2020 for what was dubbed "XFL 2.0".
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There are not a ton of teams. There are only 8 nationwide unless I am mistaken and it is easy to understand why some markets might be a bit apprehensive to get involved with investing any real amount of money into this since even though 2020 was looking OK, it wasn't really good enough to attract any huge money.
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As you have likely already heard, well, that is if you care about XFL at all, that the Rock and some business partners purchased the entire league for a paltry $15 million. Sure, it is an uphill battle since I don't think the organization has ever actually made any money, but if someone has the star power necessary to push it to a wider audience, it is probably him.
In order to "sweeten the pot" for potential viewers the XFL has tweaked a few rules to make the game a bit more interesting to the audience. These began with crazy rules so as not having a fair catch rule that basically guaranteed horrible injury. That rule was obviously scrapped but then again, so was nearly everything else since the first year of XFL was one of the biggest sports blunders of all time.
The new kickoff rule, which they already used in XFL 2.0 is going to stick around and to me, it has a chance to make things very interesting at all kickoffs.
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The way it works is that both the offense and the defense during all kickoffs will stand 5 meters apart from one another and must remain motionless until the receiver has caught the ball or the ball has been on the ground for more than 3 seconds. What this accomplishes is that almost every single kickoff results in a return and it also limits the amount of horrible injuries because the defense doesn't have the opportunity to get a sprinting head start to completely blindside a receiver who is looking up to catch the ball and knock him into next week.
This rule can and will make kickoffs a lot more interesting. If you watched the Super Bowl you probably noticed that there wasn't a single kickoff that was returned at all. This is because all teams recognize that it is simply better to kick the ball out of bounds in the backfield and let the receiving team take the ball at the 25 yard line. It's become so normal in fact that most teams simply line up to prevent an onside kick and when they see that this isn't happening they don't really put a great deal of effort into chasing the ball or blocking. This is because unless the kicker screws up, almost every team puts it in the backfield for a zero-action 25 yard placement rather than risk a potential huge play that results in massive yardage.
I think XFL designs their rules to eliminate dead times like this and at least from an entertainment perspective, it really looks like it can and should work.
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One really big problem that we could, but hopefully wont, end up seeing is that since there are so few teams and so little money invested in any of them, that there is a good probability that one team could end up emerging extremely dominant and a couple of teams could be a waste of time to even bother trying to support. I suppose they have some safeguards in place to prevent this from happening but it is a very real concern from a viewership perspective. In the NFL, people will turn up to support a losing team out of loyalty, but as it stand now I don't even know the name of a single XFL player.
I'll be tuning in on Saturday for sure but seeing as how they can't even sell out quite small stadiums for these events as it is now, they definitely have their work cut out of them. I hope they can pull it off though because having football on nearly year round would be like a dream come true for fans like me.