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Originally Posted by Ministry9006
I never got into the whole XFL thing when Vince introduced it. What caused it to expire?
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A bunch of factors, but here are the main ones:
1)
Bad TV Ratings. The opening weekend of games drew really big ratings, but then they slipped week by week. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, doesn't an XFL broadcast still hold the record for lowest-rated network program ever?
2)
Bad Football. The league was made up of players who couldn't make it in the NFL, and most of them weren't good enough for the Canadian Football League or NFL Europe, either. There were a couple of exceptions (Tommy Maddox and "He Hate Me" both went on to play in the NFL), but for the most part the players just weren't very good.
3)
Bad Marketing. The XFL was supposed to be a whole lot rougher than the NFL, with the aforementioned "No Fair Catch" rule. However, the hype didn't match the product as there was a rule preventing tacklers from being within a certain distance of the return man until after he'd fielded the ball. So, technically, there were no fair catches, but it wasn't like you could just plow the guy over and pick up the loose ball.
Also, they advertised that they would go "inside the cheerleaders' locker room." Of course, they couldn't
actually do anything salacious on network television, so it was all lame backstage sketches with bimbo cheerleaders with little personality.
4)
Bad Production. XFL
did introduce the mainstream (if you can call it that) to the hanging camera that ESPN now uses, but that's about the only innovative thing they did. The commentary in particular was abysmal (whose brilliant idea was it to put JIM ROSS on commentary? He can't even call two wrestlers by their right names, let alone 22 no-name football players!).
An alternative to the NFL sounded like a good idea, but the execution was really bad, and the league failed. Spectacularly.