As soon as Trump started a Twitter war with the National Football League, I knew there was only one logical outcome: as soon as he leaves office, he’s starting his own pro football organization.
If that truly is the endgame POTUS desires, it’s one of the most brilliant tactics in the history of psychological warfare. Here’s a guy who’s been harboring a 30 year grudge against the NFL for forcing him to shut down the USFL, and now he’s the freakin’ leader of the free world and through his built-in hyper-populist, mega-patriotic platform, he’s managed to ACTUALLY turn a large swath of Middle America against the nation’s largest sports-entertainment industrial-complex.
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This season, NFL ratings are down nearly 10 percent what they were last year. Even worse, the ratings for primetime games are down 11 percent, and studies suggest that, yes, all those regular viewers who said they would stop watching the games over the National Anthem protests indeed kept their word.
Of course, there’s a lot of factors as to why NFL ratings are down – everything from timeshifting to the ease of (not exactly legally) livestreaming games to a deluge of boring games to an abnormally high rate of injuries for star players – but at this point, there’s no denying that viewers getting upset with the nonstop politicization of the sport cannot be considered a substantial reason for the TV viewership drop.
The NFL no doubt has a major image problem. Middle America sees its owners as nothing more than a bunch of greedy hucksters hoping to shift costs to local taxpayers, its players as a bunch of wife-beating, virtue-signalling primadonnas and its literal figurehead as a chickenshit pseudo-tyrant making billions off the scrambled brains of many a CTE-ravaged black person. What was once a nigh invincible touchstone of American consumerism is now finding itself on the defensive – no longer preoccupied with global expansion and perpetual revenue generation, the NFL is now fighting tooth and nail to hold on to its TV deals and convince disinterested Americans to wedge their flabby asses into the stands.
There’s never been a better time for an upstart to seriously challenge the NFL monopoly, and if you think it’s just coincidence that Vince McMahon is starting up a new sports promotion venture, I’ve got a bridge in London I’d like to sell you.
Yes, that’s right – the head honcho of the WWE is honestly thinking about resurrecting the XFL, the shitty pro football league that lasted one season and whose only lasting cultural legacy is “He Hate Me” and a championship game in which the winners were asked to pay for their own title rings.
Of course, it was destined for failure in 2001, but in the year 2018, the idea is so damn crazy it might just work.
Let’s don’t kid ourselves, though. The XFL was utter garbage, and there was no way to get around the fact it was clearly an inferior product. Back then the emphasis was on old school, hard-nosed football, with fewer penalties and less safeguards for players. Naturally, that resulted in a ton of low-scoring games featuring shitty defenses and slightly above college caliber offenses struggling to move the ball more than five feet every possession. It was an intrinsically boring product, and no amount of exploitative hooks (Jesse Ventura on commentary! Cameras in the cheerleaders’ locker room! Opie and Anthony doing postgame shows!) could mask the reality that it was basically division II-A NCAA football gussied up to look like NFL Blitz.
But in today’s America, the hyper-political, identitarian nightmare it is, people pissed off by the NFL still want some kind of bread and circuses. Americans love the core concept of football, and if Trump and McMahon went in together for a new league, not only could it be financially successful, it might actually RIVAL the National Football League in the ratings.
But you can’t get there by calling it the XFL and simply painting the ball NWO Wolfpac colors. That shit is so pre 9/11 it hurts. What you’ve got to do is create a kind of football that appeals to the dyed-in-the-wool MAGA set. You need a league that explicitly brands itself around identitarian politics, and what better way to give the NFL the old stinkeye than by resurrecting the corpse of the XFL as the Conservative Football League?
Of course, you can’t just call it something that blunt. Surely, there’s a better title for it – the Patriotic Football Association or the Real American Football League or something along those lines – but that hardline Republican sentiment has to be baked into the product itself.
And that starts with the cities chosen for franchises. If you want to speak to the disenfranchised conservative American, you can’t say “eff you” to the NFL and then start putting teams in California and New York. The first rule of thumb for the resurrected XFL is that there will ONLY be teams in cities that voted for Trump.
And right there, we’ve got our first five teams – Oklahoma City; Fort Worth, Texas; Jacksonville, Florida; Mesa, Arizona; and Virginia Beach (which actually has a larger population than several NFL cities, including Oakland, Atlanta, Miami and Tampa.) We’ll need to add three more to balance out the divisional layout, so I figured you’d add in representatives from the three largest remaining metropolitan statistical areas that voted for Trump – Birmingham, Alabama; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Nashville, Tennessee.
So in one division you’d have the four westernmost teams – Mesa, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City and Birmingham – and in the other, the easternmost teams (Nashville, Cincinnati, Jacksonville and Virginia Beach.) All of them are top 50 TV markets, all of them have (or have had) pro sports teams and it’s safe to assume they’ll all remain Republican for at least another 10 or 15 years. Plus, they’re spread pretty wide, geographically, so each team should pick up a considerable out of state-following.
Now, my suggestion is that instead of giving them some stupid nickname like the Maniax and the Xtreme, you try to play up to the regional college football tradition. For example, the team colors of the Birmingham team would be maroon and orange – a combination of the University of Alabama and Auburn hues. Similarly, Jacksonville’s uniforms would be red, green and blue, merging the distinct tones of Florida, Florida State and Miami into a singularity. Fort Worth, of course, would represent all of Texas, while the Cincinnati team would pretty much represent the entirety of the Midwest (for that reason, I’d suggest naming the team the Rust Belt (Whatevers), a’la the New England Patriots.)
There are a ton of former NFL and Canadian Football League players just champing at the bit to get back on the gridiron, so stocking each team shouldn’t be hard at all. But what the XFL 2.0 really needs to do is to go after ACTIVE college players. Thanks to the NFL’s rookie salary structuring protocols, this is something Vince actually could do. What bigger middle finger to the League could possibly exist than the 2020 Heisman Trophy winner foregoing the NFL draft and signing with the revamped XFL for twice as much money? By clamping down on the college to pro pipeline from the get go, the professional quality discrepancy between the two leagues could close as quickly as half a decade.
In this, the post-CTE era, it’s probably not a good idea to emphasize laxed rules that guarantee more career-ending injuries. Instead, all the new XFL has to do to differentiate itself from Roger Goodell’s leviathan is to de-liberalize the product. If you want viewers today, all you have to do is incorporate a league-wide rule that stipulates any player who doesn’t stand for the National Anthem forgoes his paycheck that week. No bans, no benching, no fines – just a scenario where players are forced to put their mouths where their money isn’t. I can see Vince McMahon at the press conference now. “In my League, if you’re too offended to stand for the American flag, surely, you’re just as offended to stand up for the American dollar.” The opening day ratings in Red State America would be through the roof on the basis of that alone.
Oh, and just to make liberals angrier, be sure to appoint black NFL greats (and Trump voters) like Fred Williamson and Jim Brown to high executive positions. That way, when anybody tries to chide the League for being prejudiced, all the XFL has to do is point out how much more diverse its front office is than the NFL and watch the heads explode.
Ideally, the League would run an 11 week regular season, with each team playing their divisional foes twice and getting one bye week. The regular season would run from Memorial Day until the first week of August (easily the biggest dead zone in American sports), with the playoffs and championship game wrapping up one week before the start of the college football season. Of course, with more teams entering the League this format would need some changing around, but the core concept is the same: fill the void between the NBA Championship and the start of NCAA football, keep gaining market traction and just wait for the opportunity to start creeping into NFL season overlap a few years down the road.
The newfangled XFL can succeed, but it can only succeed by playing it conservatively (hence, the sly double meaning of the Conservative Football League nomenclature.) That means starting slow and building up momentum, not going for the kill right out the gate. Think about it; there’s never been an NFL game played on the Fourth of July. America’s game has never been played on America’s birthday. People are desperate for any kind of entertainment in the summer, and something tells me a lot of prospective players would much prefer playing in Virginia Beach and Fort Worth in July than Green Bay and Detroit come December.
Scrambling for a ball instead of a coin toss and eliminating fair catches won’t do shit to break the NFL’s stranglehold on the pro football market. But giving fans a de-politicized, high-caliber college-level product during the summer doldrums – which gradually improves year after year thanks to college draftees and NFL atrophy – could slowly but surely unclasp their fingers from the death grip.
Everybody laughed the first time Vince said he was going after the NFL. After all, we knew failure was imminent. But there’s a very good reason why people are treating the latest XFL rumors with a bit more seriousness than they did in 2000. That’s because we can all smell the blood on the gridiron – the NFL’s a vulnerable giant, and with just the right conservative approach, this time around Vinny Mac and company might put Goliath flat on his ass.
