But when the XFL debuts Feb. 3 on NBC, here’s what fans will actually see: a real football game. For skeptics, Las Vegas–the ultimate arbiter of such matters–is taking book on XFL contests, just as on the Super Bowl. But any other resemblance to Sunday’s NFL showdown will be slim. Despite major-league menace in the teams’ names–Memphis Maniax, L.A. Xtreme–XFL players are largely minor leaguers, NFL wannabes and has-beens. Talent isn’t the lure; action is. McMahon says he started the league because the NFL’s brand of football has lost its edge: it’s too slow and too stodgy. Working with Dick Ebersol, NBC’s innovative sports honcho, McMahon has created a league that promises football with attitude. On the field, the XFL boasts some wrinkles in the rules to speed up the action and boost the number of bone-rattling collisions. (Fair catches are for wimps.) “We’re going to bring back smash-mouth football,” says the once fearsome NFL linebacker Dick Butkus, now an XFL official. Off the field, it’s a soap opera with dozens of story lines. Sideline reporters will demand answers from coaches and players who screw up. Cheerleaders will be asked to bare their souls and God knows what else.
Viewers raised on MTV will feel right at home tuning in to the XFL. The NBC telecasts will feature more cameras than Michael Douglas’s wedding, with key combatants miked to amplify every grunt and taunt. Yet the XFL decided against using plays to overturn bad calls, preferring to stir up fans’ wrath. When controversy doesn’t come naturally, it will be provoked. In the broadcast booth McMahon envisions a verbal free-for-all, with moonlighting Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura as the 800-pound gorilla in the fray. “It’s going to be the color guy disagreeing with the play-by-play guy, who disagrees with the sideline reporter, who disagrees with the coach–and some fan may get the chance to tell them they’re all full of s–t,” says McMahon.
While the league promises that no one will be scripting lines, the players already get the drift. Xtreme QB Tommy Maddox, an ex-NFLer who once backed up John Elway, says that after he throws an interception, nobody wants him to expound on the complexities of throwing against zone defenses. “The first time someone punches out a cameraman, Vince’s gonna be going, ‘Yeeeahh! We’ve arrived, baby’,” says Maddox.
McMahon himself arrived years ago, turning a cartoon sport into a billion-dollar business empire. (Ebersol is no slouch when it comes to developing pioneering art forms. In an earlier life he helped create “Saturday Night Live.”) In promoting this newest venture, McMahon has alternated between traditional football hype and salacious teases. He told one publication that a cheerleader might be asked on-camera if she was doing “the wild thing” with a player the previous night. (Fraternization is favored, not forbidden, as it is in what McMahon calls the “No Fun League.”) Just joking, he said later, though he still promises “we’ll know the cheerleaders by name.” Perhaps some fans, too. “When not a lot is going on, we may cut to some inebriated guy in the stands and ask him a philosophical question about the game,” says McMahon. “That’s 30 seconds of entertainment.”
Just who is supposed to watch this “entertainment”? Adolescent (and adolescent-minded) males, an audience that networks traditionally covet. But the league’s budding, ribald image already makes many in the corporate world cringe. “Advertisers don’t want to be associated with that crap,” says Don Rank, who buys national advertising for prime accounts like McDonald’s, Visa, Pepsi, Nissan and Apple. NBC is not totally insensitive to such concerns, which is why on-field audio will be broadcast with a 4i-second delay. Still, the network says it has sold 60 percent of its ad spots, including major clients such as Anheuser-Busch, Pep Boys and the U.S. Army.
With eight teams in a compact, 12-week season, the XFL hopes to capitalize on the traditional sports lull before the spring glut of basketball and hockey playoffs and the start of baseball. Moreover, with NBC and the WWF owning the league lock, stock and black and red footballs, it is far easier to control costs. Virtually all players earn the same $45,000 salary. Indeed, Ebersol insists it will cost far less to produce an entire season of XFL than it would to fill Saturday night with more typical prime-time fare. The league’s estimated start-up costs are $100 million.
The early buzz is strong, thanks to a popular Web site and a witty “Gladiator”-style ad campaign. But can the league sustain interest without a roster of big-name stars? The XFL is counting on the fact that while fans adore the big stars, they abhor the big salaries. Its players, they boast in ads, are playing “for the love of the game.” That’s a lovely, old-fangled sentiment, and one the XFL players privately admit isn’t remotely true. Their dream, of course, is to parlay an XFL star turn into an NFL job.
