McMahon
NEW YORK -- Sunday's lackluster Super Bowl has shot a lightning bolt of energy through the marketers of the XFL, the new football league that kicks off its regular season Feb. 3 with the first of 10 weekly Saturday night games on NBC.
Over the past few months, the XFL has made no bones about drawing up an anti-NFL blueprint to liven up the games -- no fair catches, no boring point-after-touchdown kicks, plenty of showboating by players on the field. This strategy is the brainchild of Vince McMahon, chairman of the World Wrestling Federation, which is co-owner of the XFL with NBC.
The Baltimore Ravens' 34-7 wipeout of the New York Giants should be a PR windfall for the XFL, said David Carter, a principal in the Los Angeles-based Sports Business Group.
The XFL's rule changes, Carter said, "could result in a faster, more exciting contest" than the typical NFL game.
Is the NFL looking over its shoulder? "Frankly, it's been a minor aspect of what we worry about," said NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, "or, in many cases, it's just a complete nonissue."
Best, worst of times?
The XFL is almost certain to charge onto the field with the best opening day (in television terms) in the history of any new professional sports league. But its potential success as a fan-pleasing entertainment could harbor the seeds of its eventual demise as a legitimate sports attraction.
The league can justify its boasts of a first-day bonanza because three of the four weekly games played by the eight-team association will get national-TV coverage. In addition to NBC's Saturday-night game, UPN will broadcast a game every Sunday night and the TNN cable net every Sunday afternoon, both starting Feb. 4.
"No startup league has ever enjoyed such extensive reach on television from day one," said Basil DeVito, president of the XFL.
DeVito said he believes it's not only the wide availability of the games to a mass TV audience that will spark interest in the league but the enormous marketing machine of the WWF and NBC. Together, the WWF and NBC will have spent about $40 million to promote the XFL by its Feb. 3 opening day, DeVito said.
As a result of this ad blitz, league surveys show that 65%-70% of respondents have expressed some familiarity with the XFL, according to De Vito.
Reality may bite
But Ken Schantzer, president of NBC Sports, acknowledged what he called "the fine line we're going to have to walk" between the emphatic declaration by the league that the XFL games themselves will be real football -- legitimate and above-board -- and the reputation of McMahon as a P.T. Barnum-like manipulator who employs more writers than a soap opera to script every grunt emitted in the ring by the WWF's wrestlers.
"The league's games are going to be under intense scrutiny," said the Sports Business Group's Carter. "The national and local press will be digging under every rock to uncover even a hint that McMahon is predetermining the outcome of any of the games to pull in bigger audiences."
But NBC's Schantzer is convinced that when the players start pounding and smashing each other in the weekly games, there'll be no doubt about the authenticity of the league. He had just spent a few days at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, one of the XFL's eight cities, in mid-January watching players battling for a spot on the roster in exhibition games.
"It's not too extreme to say that these players were fighting for their lives," Schantzer said. "For many of these guys, it's their last shot at achieving the dream of playing in a professional football league."
Vegas value
Although most sports leagues don't go around promoting their Las Vegas betting lines, the XFL is ecstatic that, as McMahon puts it, the Vegas oddsmakers have "thoroughly embraced" the XFL "because it will bring a lot of business to them in what tends to be a down period following the Super Bowl." There are no betting lines on WWF wrestling extravaganzas, so DeVito says Las Vegas has conferred validity on the league by taking bets on the results of games.
Gamblers are even booking bets on games that feature the XFL's Las Vegas Outlaws. Nevada state law allows sports entities to determine whether betting will be permitted on local teams. The NCAA, for instance, prohibits wagering on games played by UNLV, but the XFL has given the bookies its blessing.
DeVito says he's also received guarantees by the major newspapers in the eight XFL cities that they'll assign a beat reporter to the games -- another important step in providing the league with legitimacy as a sports enterprise, not just a showbiz operation.
But DeVito acknowledges that "outside of the markets where we have teams, it probably will be difficult to get coverage." In addition to Orlando and Las Vegas, the XFL markets are Los Angeles, New York/New Jersey, Chicago, San Francisco, Memphis and Birmingham.
Another wrinkle
Attracting the attention of ESPN and Fox Sports will be equally difficult -- though the new league is not immediately counting on much coverage from them -- because both are part of media congloms that pay the NFL billions of dollars in their current eight-year contracts.
The NFL hasn't raised a ruckus with CBS, a sister company of UPN and TNN, because -- like Arena Football and the Canadian Football League -- XFL games won't compete directly with games of the NFL.
Ratings on NBC, UPN and TNN will be the lifeblood of the XFL. DeVito and Schantzer said their goal is to chalk up on NBC a rating of 3-4 --a number that seems low but that could attract swarms of advertisers because the league is pitching its message to males between the ages of 12 and 25. Madison Avenue typically considers that young-male demo harder to reach than any other category.
But even though TV and cable coverage are crucial to the economic health of the XFL, Schantzer said he and McMahon are just as dedicated to giving ticket-buyers a better time than they get at an NFL game. For example, the XFL has installed elaborate audio systems in all of its stadiums, Schantzer said, allowing fans to hear the crunching sound of players' bodies colliding on every scrimmage.
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