Pretty much the only thing that Bob Costas and I agree on is that the XFL is/was a really stupid idea. Finding ways to make football "more violent" would lead to serious problems all around, both for the players and ironically, for the fans who would get more and more desensitized to violence and thus seek out more and more violent forms of entertainment. There are rumors all around that the XFL is making an ill advised comeback.
This will fail for many reasons. The biggest and most obvious is that it failed once before, well over a decade ago. I'm sure that there are some forms of entertainment that failed before and come back to success years later, but minor league sports generally aren't among them. With so many different things out there begging for your attention to entertain you, the XFL will have massive competition.
Arena football is learning the hard way that being a minor league football team is damn near impossible. Arena football has all sorts of problems, but the biggest one is that the teams don't really make money. The XFL will be arena football 2.0, and it will almost certainly fail again. Vince McMahon is a genius in marketing and business, there can be no doubt about that whatsoever. Shame he's not learning from past experience on this one.
I'm skeptical as well, but I can't say I'd be surprised to see the XFL do better now than it did previously. It has the massive marketing potential of social media behind it now. If they can capitalize on that, then they might have a legit shot. I think they'd also be smart to look into live streaming options for their games. That would give them a huge advantage over the NFL in a market that is seeing people rapidly abandon cable. The NFL is very inaccessible to cable-cutters. The XFL should take advantage of that fact.
ReplyDeleteThose are all great points, and I agree with every single one of them. If the XFL implements your dead on suggestions, it'll go from being "impossible to succeed" to merely difficult.
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