What really happened to the XFL?

I know many of you might not care about this, but I feel a real kinship with the old XFL. It was with this league that I got my first sports writing job, and it was the first sports league I interviewed with. I often wonder what might have been, but alas the XFL lasted only one year lost about 50 million bucks, and ever since people have pointed the finger to why the league failed and who actually pulled the plug on the struggling sports franchise.

The accepted truth for a long time was that NBC wanted out, after losing a ton of cash in a really lame attempt to get back at the NFL for signing a TV deal with CBS it seemed NBC had had enough. However there have always been rumors that UPN and a few others wanted to keep going. The accepted truth was that UPN offered Vince McMahon a deal, keep on with the UFL but cut the Smack down WWE show by half an hour to an hour. We have heard Vince was unwilling to do that and the league was shipped out to pasture.

Now with Linda McMahon running for a Senate seat a lot of interesting tid bits have come out. The most surprising of all is that ESPN was willing to air XFL games in year two. That is pretty surprising that NBC backed way off, and ESPN was ready to step in. This move would surely have grown the XFL fan base, and given the league a real chance at survival.

In the end it seems that what killed the XFL was that is was not a sport, it was just a TV show. NBC and Vince McMahon thought they could run a sports league the same way Vince ran his wrestling empire. He though he could inject storylines into the game of football and turn that sport into a weekly soap opera for guys much the way the WWE TV product does. What killed the XFL was the premise turned out to not be a good one, and sports fans want sports not entertainment.

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