I like the XFL. I like it because it's legitimate, high-quality professional football with some useful rules adjustments. The problem is that, with just four games each week, when one or two of those games are dreadful, the league takes an interest hit that is difficult to overcome. The NFL has a couple of clunkers, sometimes four or five, each and every week, but airtime on sports highlight shows is devoted to the competitive contests. Audiences never get the sense that the NFL as a whole is peddling quagmire games. The XFL, with just four games a week, doesn't have the luxury of televising multiple clunkers without losing viewers.
As I've mentioned previously, sometimes what superficially appears as a solution may instead turn out to be a problem.
Play Clock
As Alabama coach Nick Saban said two years ago, college football must decide if it wants to be a continuous action sport or football as it's been historically played. The XFL, by shortening the play clock, has leaned into the side of more plays and something resembling forced continuous action. More plays, however, does not always mean more offense. When the play clock is shortened to such an extent that the ball is routinely snapped within two seconds of clock expiration, that is no boon to the offense.
Like jockeys in horse racing or NBA players with a shot clock, defensive football players have a fairly accurate stopwatch in their heads. They know when the play clock is down to three, then two seconds, and being able to time the snap is an enormous defensive advantage. Play clock reduction in the XFL has gotten to the brink of creating offensive disadvantages in the name of generating x number of overall plays. What seemed superficially to be an aid to exciting offense and more yards may instead be a metronome enabling defenses to time their responses to snaps more easily.
Entertainment versus Sport
The WWE is an entertainment product with a top-down vertical deisgn. Everyone is on the same page, more or less, to provide consistent, seamless, exciting entertainment for each and every WWE event. Unless you're The Rock, nobody really has their eye on prizes beyond the WWE.
The XFL, however, is very different. The majority of the players and coaches have their eyes on opportunities in the NFL. For almost all XFL participants, from coaches to coordinators to players to trainers, the NFL hangs over the XFL like some wish-fulfillment Sword of Damocles. The NFL is always there, watching.
The XFL is not scripted. This creates an organizational stress since there is no guarantee that fans won't see a string of six or seven consecutive noncompetitive games or contests with paint-drying action. The fact that each game stands alone sequentially provides viewers many chances to decide that the product is not their cup of tea. I'm not sure that many people appreciate how NFL broadcasts, with their continuous updating of other scores and fantasy stats, are able to prop up noncompetitive games. The XFL does not have this luxury.
While the WWE can impose a top-down control of its product, the XFL teams are composed of individuals whose primary goals are competing and winning, not entertaining per se. When it comes to football games, this same entertainment management therefore does not have real control of its product. It must be very difficult for management used to tightly controlled vertical cohesion to deal with this every single day.
I hope that the XFL discovers ways to overcome some of these stealth issues and enjoy great success. I wish it the very best.
March 11, 2020
Bob Dietz
Note: due to coronavirus, the XFL today suspended operations for 2020, but pledges that it will back in 2021.
