~~~~~~~WEEK ONE~~~~~~~~~

(As covered in the February, 12 2001 issue of the WON)

With fan and media reaction after its debut all across the board and a huge buzz leading to a monstrous television rating, the only way to review the debut of the XFL over the weekend is this. Despite what sports people may think and even hardcore fans of sports may think, the majority of people attend sporting events as well as wrestling events based on quality of hype. They enjoy themselves based on quality of atmosphere of the show, and going home happy (either the babyface prevailing at the end or the home team prevailing). If you have a good time, you want to go back, but to get the masses to attend, the masses have to also believe what they are attending is “hot” or in some ways “important” either in a mainstream way or in a niche way.

The show drew a 9.49 rating and 17 share, leading it to being easily the highest rated show on television for the night. NBC had drawn a 4.7 the previous Saturday night. Strongest metered markets were Las Vegas, at 17.7, which was where the first game was played, and Minneapolis at 14.9, which is the home city of the league’s biggest drawing card, announcer Jesse Ventura. It also drew a 12.5 in Birmingham and an 11.4 in Memphis as the next two highest markets, both cities with franchises. New York, even with a franchise and in the market with the most media hype and with a team in the game, drew right at the national average with a 9.5, a number Smackdown often approaches. Weakest markets were Salt Lake City (6.5), Miami (7.1) and Hartford (7.3). The rating was drawn by nothing but hype and if this league is successful, it will go a long way toward establishing Vince McMahon, for better or worse, mainstream, as the great sports promoter of our time. All four live venues drew more than 30,000 fans for the opening weekend including people legitimately turned away in Orlando (where they didn’t open the upper deck so there were tens of thousands of seats unsold for which led to some bad p.r. locally from people turned away and a lot of negative pub about announcing a crowd of 36,000 as a sellout). The sustaining of a strong numbers will be based on continuation of that hype and nobody knows that field better than a good wrestling promoter, and people enjoying themselves watching the game, which has a lot to do with presentation and atmosphere. The USFL in the 80s on ABC debuted to a 14.2 rating and had markets which drew huge crowds early before dying and others that just died from the start but publicly resorted to papering to giving the illusion of early success. USFL started falling fast from there, and the league folded within a few years. By week ten, the USFL was down to a 4.2 before bottoming out at a 3.3 and losing prime time network coverage. It also should be noted that with all the TV stations and competition, that a 9.5 today is more impressive than a 14.2 in the 80s.

There is one very significant negative to those numbers, and that is the audience declined constantly through the show with one exception, with an audience drop of 37% during the show which is a staggering amount. The switch to the “B” game at 11 p.m. was the only part of the show which ever saw a very brief audience increase. No matter how that attempts to be spun, it is a strong negative in that tons of people were drawn in by the hype, but with more constantly turning it off than on, the show didn’t deliver in the eyes of an awful lot of viewers, which indicates that next week’s numbers may be way down. The good news is even the bottom audience when they pulled out of the boring Las Vegas-New York game (8.1) is far beyond what the league needs to attract to be a huge hit, let alone the mid-4’s the network was doing in the time slot so far this season. It was far ahead of the 5.8 in the top 49 metered markets that the Pro Bowl did the next day or the 2.4 that the NHL All-Star game drew, which in both cases were the best quality players in the world on one stage as opposed to players not good enough in all but a very few cases of marginal players who fell through the cracks politically, to make even an NFL practice squad. The XFL opener destroyed the Pro Bowl in every demographic group.

The second game of the weekend, on UPN the next afternoon with San Francisco vs. Los Angeles, drew a 3.08 rating and 6 share. In the breakdown to get an 11.0 overall rating that advertisers were originally promised (which has since been scaled back to a 10.0 in some cases and maybe even a 9.0) was NBC at 5.5 (now scaled back to 4.5), UPN at 3.0 and TNN at 2.5. When the first week after all the hype does a 3.08, that 3.0 season average may be tough, although UPN will broadcast the rest of the games in prime time which will help only if the novelty factor had already worn off by Sunday. Even though that game was SF vs. LA, those weren’t the strongest TV markets for the game, which did by far the best in Jacksonville (8.9), Memphis (6.2) and Norfolk (6.2) and bombed in Cincinnati (0.7) and Salt Lake City (0.2).

What is most interesting about the two shows is the demographics, and analyzing the league’s future depends on which audience it is largely appealing to, the older more sports-oriented football audience, or the younger pro wrestling audience. The idea was they would mix both. The NBC game drew a pro wrestling audience, with the best demo being Males 12-17 (10.6 rating) followed by 25-34, very similar to the breakdown of Raw. One survey indicated that 75 percent of the viewing audience for the first night considered themselves WWF wrestling fans. The young adult male demo, according to NBC, drew its best rating for a Saturday night on that network since March 24, 1990 for “Golden Girls” and “Hunter.” However, the second game’s strongest audience was Males 35-49, which is the NFL prime demographic. If the wrestling audience was the one tuning in as a novelty, and despite the polls showing wrestling fans liked it on the internet, they were also the prime audience tuning out in droves as that game went on and that didn’t watch the second game, its success may be more skewed toward what traditional sports fans want as opposed to what teenagers looking for instant gratification and pro wrestling antics want. The McMahon oriented announcing and sketches, which is what the teenage audience was expecting with the “Xtreme” tag word, didn’t appear to hold that audiences interest as the rating dropped fairly significantly, mostly over the first 90 minutes (26% of the drop in audience was between 8:30 p.m. and 9:45 p.m., basically enough time to sample). The IJPN did not have a similar turnoff factor, as the audience stayed relatively steady in a game that ended on the last play, but also didn’t draw that audience. None of the major advertisers that were going in leery about potential sleaziness of the product expressed some concern but were overall pleased. Tony Ponturo, VP of Sports and marketing for Anheuser-Busch told the New York Times they walked the line carefully, but expressed concern that they need to have a better quality of play and said, “I hope they’re not thinking of how to shock people in the future.”

The response from the media overall was very negative and often sad. Most of it was condescending, except for a lot of NBC and UPN affiliates, which have a financial stake in its success. A lot of high profile sportswriters showed they don’t understand that sports fit into the entertainment world and why fans attend. Rules of games and how to cover them don’t come down from Mount Olympus and it isn’t blasphemy to change them. Sports have to be marketed well and hyped tremendously or they will fail on a professional level. Sports purists who see marketing as the enemy don’t understand business economics and if a sport isn’t run primarily based on business economics, whether it be the USFL or SMW or ECW, ultimately it will fail. There will be good and bad innovations and the trick is to ditch the ones that don’t work and keep the ones that do to make it a strong television product. Phil Mushnick, in a blistering negative column on 2/5, did make one very strong point that may have been the saddest of all, seeing network affiliate newscasts pander to creating fake news stories to hype their own television shows and attempt to get them across as news. Both the Los Angeles and New York UPN affiliates basically have a rule to do at least one positive WWF piece for every Thursday night newscast. Economically, it makes sense to try and keep the wrestling audience on the station’s biggest prime time night of the week, but from a pure news standpoint, it is the equivalent of prostitution. Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times had a valid point about the announcing sellouts in stadiums with an empty upper deck. But much of the criticism was unfounded. The players were often more experienced than those in NFL Europe and better than those in Canada and the Arena league. The crowds were strong. There were flaws and much of the criticism of the league, such as ‘gratuitous violence” and tawdry titillation” (Leonard Shapiro, Washington Post) may have been inspired by McMahon’s hyping of the product and were valid points to criticize before the first game because that is how the product was being sold, but just as the product didn’t deliver on that hype, once a game is played, it can’t be criticized negatively for things hyped that really weren’t in the product, except when bringing up the point it didn’t deliver on the hype in those aspects. You can’t knock the product delivered as sleazy only because the advertising leading up to it was. There was an unfortunate media predisposed to hate this because of McMahon’s shady reputation and what he was selling to draw the first rating and criticism of both McMahon and how he sold to get the rating is valid criticism, but not because it was a league owned by a wrestling promoter, with that inherent sportswriter mindset that pro wrestling is evil because it is entertainment and not pure sport.

People who dismiss the XFL making it based on quality of play, or that it’s first week success shows how stupid fans are for buying second-rate football in such great numbers, don’t understand the business of sports. It is not the great game or the great fight that draws, it’s the hyping of that event and creating an aura around it. This was football, a popular sport, hyped well, with good marketing around a new premise. People bought out of curiosity, because nobody knew what it was going to be. There wasn’t one guy on the field who even made an NFL roster this past season, but it still greatly outdrew a game featuring the elite players in the NFL, the Pro Bowl, held the next day, and in many demos, beat the season opener of Monday night football. USFL also started strong as a TV product and didn’t make it, but didn’t have the media and fan buzz like this because it was selling football as opposed to selling entertainment wrapped around a football game. After failing big with the Olympics, and with the disappointment of the NBA’s falling ratings post-Michael, Dick Ebersol took the risk and saved McMahon, who would not have had anywhere this level of success or hype or been taken seriously enough with this venture by the media to hate it so much to create the curiosity without NBC being behind the product and likely would have failed with just TNN and UPN. People who ‘dismiss it with the weather argument (people won’t go to watch football in the February cold in Chicago) are right if there is no hype or buzz, but people will watch a hot product in the snow without giving it a second thought as NFL sellouts in snowstorms for decades have proven or as people camping out in the rain for days for hot concert tickets have shown. Dismissing it with the Saturday night argument (males of the age they are trying to attract are out on Saturday nights) is even worse. Great television shows have drawn huge ratings on Saturday nights in the past. While nobody expects the numbers to stay at the level of the debut, a 4.5 average for the season hardly looks out of the question. It doesn’t matter when something you want to see is on, you find it and watch it. When WWF was drawing a huge childrens rating and on Dog show night or tennis night they aired from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., while the audience dropped from normal levels, they still did huge even though kids had school the next day and people had to work the next morning. Logically, the numbers in that time period should have been small, just as when New Japan airs a big match at 3:15 a.m. nobody should watch more than a hash-marks’ worth, but if it’s something people really want to see, they find a way to see it. If people grow to not like it and the buzz dies, it can fail, and quickly. But the press it’s going to get out of this rating won’t allow this to happen so quickly in a society that grabs fads like Survivor and makes them larger than life immediately and the buzz alone takes on a life of its own. When WWF runs Raw in California, the live show starts on a Monday at 4:30 p.m., in the middle of rush hour traffic. But if the product is hot, they still sell all the tickets immediately. If this is a cold product in five weeks, all those negative factors could become important. If it’s hot and people have fun, they are going to watch whenever it’s on and brave almost any elements to be part of the atmosphere. One thing anyone who has followed wrestling has learned that if there is something people don’t want to see, there is almost nothing you can do and no amount of advertising and exposure can be spent (see WCW, 2000) to make them see it what they don’t like. And if it’s something people badly want to see, the weather won’t keep them away. For a marginal product, the weather is an element, just as when wrestling is marginal, bad weather can hurt a house, but when wrestling is on fire, you can, and usually do, sellout in a blizzard (WCW’s first Nitro in St. Louis at the TWA Dome in 1998 drew $914,000 on one of the worst weather days in years in that city).

The XFL debut proved to be exactly nothing all that extreme. It was neither the extremely bad football its critics were expecting. Nor was it extremely sexual or violent or outrageous, as Vince McMahon had promised. It was an innovative approach to televising football and stretched the boundaries of some things by football standards by implementing wrestling promotional devices. Even with the rule modifications, it simply looked like football with slight modifications such as no coin toss (didn’t miss it) and no kicking extra points (less predictable). Sponsors on the fence had to be happy, not just with the rating it delivered and fan enthusiasm to the product, but that it wasn’t as sleazy as feared, and that the delay made almost all the swearing disappear, something the NFL can’t claim. They had to be happy it wasn’t scripted, at least on the field, although that had been clear for some time. It wasn’t Rollerball in pads and nobody got paralyzed on the fair catch rule (the fine print of it makes it almost impossible to have that killer hit that the NFL allows fair catches because the receiver gets a five yard zone the defends can’t enter until he catches, making a thirty yard sprint into a fixed target steadying to catch a punt which is dangerous as all very difficult). There was more emphasis on showing the cheerleaders to be sure, but there were no strip teases or shower scenes and nobody asked one of them about their sex lives with the players. It wasn’t outrageous ECW high spots built into football plays. The mics everywhere did make it a slightly different experience as a novelty but long-run I’m not sure it’s as big a deal as it was made out to be. Having announcers talk to the players as they were running on the field didn’t seem to add a thing as nobody had a lot to say. Interviewing a player after a fumble is going to lead to the inevitable hot tempered player or coach getting physical with a sideline reporter, but I think McMahon expects that and wants the publicity that will bring. The halftime locker room scene in both dressing rooms the first night was a total dud. Another week like that and scripting will start creeping into the game because no doubt there will be strong encouragement to the coaches to do a hell of a lot more with the players during the half. If that doesn’t work, the next step is scripting. The argument would be, that the scripting isn’t actually part of the game itself. And then what about the cameras picking up coaches talking about doing a fake field goal later in the series. How hard will it be for that information to get to the other team? At that point, you have perverted the sport itself beyond rule changes.

There really was nothing in the secondary game on Saturday night to greatly cross the line, but some of Jerry Lawler’s comments on the cheerleaders (wide receivers and tight ends) probably stretched the borders to people who have never watched wrestling, but it was still tame compared to him shrieking about puppies on Raw. But comments like that led to Lawler and Jim Ross being excoriated in USA Today by Rudy Martzke, being given an “F” and “D-” for their performance, and ironically Martzke apparently was so predisposed to hate the announcers because they were wrestling announcers that he didn’t realize they were by far the best crew of the three. The announcers were clearly encouraged to at times rip the teams, but most badly came across as shills, as they never questioned the rules and were pumping up the league to the point it became almost nauseating. Most were not good. With Jesse Ventura coming across early like a 1 980s pro wrestling announcer and Ross and Lawler coming across like a pair of 2001 wrestling announcers, it did feel like listening to good wrestling announcers do football as if it was wrestling, or in the case of Bosworth, a Steve McMichael calibre wrestling announcer doing football. Still, to many, like sometimes on a good night of Raw, Ross came across as the star of the show, more than any of the anonymous players, the first night.

The “A” game, with the New York Hitmen vs. Las Vegas Outlaws wasn’t that exciting of a game. The different camera angles, the micing of players and the nicknames of some players on their jerseys did make it seem like a movie about football more than a football game on television. It was new, but it was still a bad game. There were mixed reviews on Ventura and Matt Vasgersian. Maybe mixed is even too kind. Ventura was as I would have figured, not particularly well prepared, great delivery, but overall he had a boring game to call and he seemed to lose his enthusiasm by the third quarter and did not come close to living up to the hype. Vasgersian was nowhere near the calibre of the announcers the NFL has, but they also were working their second game (they did a practice game two weeks ago). But Ventura’s got the name, the delivery, and the charm as well as huge regional drawing power, which makes him able to overcome his faults, but also doesn’t respond well to criticism, which will no doubt become a factor if he doesn’t improve on his weaknesses. Ventura was a total pro’s pro next to Brian Bosworth, who was nothing short of an annoying shill as he kept over and over repeating company tag lines like a bad pro wrestling announcer who tries to sell you on the idea that every Monday night is the greatest Monday night of all-time to the point you can’t believe a word he says. Carol Grow and Dara Torres, who only proved that at least when it came to those two, Vince was right in that interview where he said he didn’t want any women on the broadcast team, then went and hired two who came across as sore thumbs.

Ross and Lawler had a far more exciting game to call on Saturday, but with the original plan of broadcasting it into Chicago and Orlando being changed and the plan being just to use the game for cutaways (right now it’s uncertain if the “B” team games will go into the local markets or, like last night, the entire country will see the “A” team game and ironically the best team they have may get very little air time), it was covered without all the trappings of the other game such as cameras everywhere. It was a good move, but a risky one, to pull away from a dull game with the major league crew early in the fourth quarter and all the advertised gimmicks and go to the closer game, something most sports wouldn’t do under the same circumstances. Instead of a different look, that game just looked like watching football, and it was also the time frame with the smallest tune-out factor, dropping two percent in audience with the switch to old-time as opposed to drops of five to 16 percent every half hour with futuristic coverage, but it was that coverage that was part of the reason for the big rating to begin with. Both Sunday games, with far less viewers, went down to the wire. But even with a good game, Ross, at the wrestling hyper level as opposed to what you’d expect from football at the beginning, seemed like he was commentating on wrestling by over-pushing things. By the end, Ross’ descriptive commentary made me enjoy the game a lot. An exciting game, whether it’s at the high school level or the NFL level, is still an exciting game once they’ve got you watching. But I don’t think it was just game quality that made the pro wrestling announcing team stand out greatly when the NBC show was over. Perhaps the XFL’s first real quarterback controversy is going to be when the guys hired on as the “B” team announcers are so far superior to the “A” team featuring the league’s most famous employee, Ventura. But like a midcarder the company has no plans for outworking a main eventer with a huge name and who draws ratings, don’t expect any change to be made.

It appeared the crowd was having fun. The larger than expected opening crowds as well as the rating showed the hype had worked. Hyping something big enough can make something seem important enough to overcome bad product delivery at the beginning, but not consistently. One would expect the ratings to drop because the hype for week one was enormous, and the key to this league is the ratings, mostly the NBC number. My feeling coming out of it was positive since the fans in the stands had the attitude they were going to enjoy it no matter what (one of the big differences in WWF and WCW crowds now is that single factor, WWF fans go in with the idea they are going to have fun and WCW fans go in with the idea for the most part that they aren’t which means the wrestlers have to perform much better to get the crowd into the show) but week four will start telling the real story.

But then the secondary questions come up. One thing that will get annoying is the constant talk, trying to romanticize the fact the players are being paid relatively little, as if they’re doing it for the love of the game. They’re doing it because it’s a better job in most cases than the one they have, or they’re doing it hopeful it’s a springboard to the NFL. You will almost never, if ever, hear one player turn down an offer by an NFL over being a star in the XFL, no matter how many “they’re playing because they love the game” con speeches trying to make heroes of how little the guys are guaranteed you constantly heard, not to say that approach isn’t the right approach. Paul Heyman sold ECW fans that angle for years, and was convincing enough that some of the wrestlers themselves bought it. Even before the first game, the ECW analogy had been used by many regarding the league long-term. Clearly, with its ripping on the much larger NFL for being the corporate league (ECW ripping on WCW and WWF for being corporate wrestling and romanticizing itself with “no corporate sponsors”) and trying to sell the passion of people not making much money playing because of this love that doesn’t exist in the NFL (see above), rather than the real reason, which in most cases is chasing the NFL dream of big money. The big. stars they cultivate will wind up in the NFL unless, the NFL considers them physically not equipped (the too small wrestlers who are great workers in ECW that got over are sometimes hit with when stars in other companies explain why they can’t be real stars). The really successful innovations in production will end up in the NFL and ultimately they’ll be doing that league a big favor in the long run (three-point play in the old ABA, which is now a staple at almost every level of basketball). If they create a true superstar, they’ve only got him for one year unless they change the salary structure with success, which is why the emphasis won’t be on creating superstars as much as creating team loyalty, the Heyman approach. Heyman ultimately, at least this week, looks like he failed in the long-term with this approach. But the reasons, running out of money, is not something either the WWF or NBC have to worry about, and unlike Heyman who felt he needed it for his niche to be different, this league can survive with a sponsor friendly product. When the economics weren’t nearly as one-sided years ago when Japan was still only a three-party race, the great in-ring quality of All Japan had times when it was outdrawn by the garbage wrestling of FMW.

Rock, Austin and Undertaker did interviews cut into the shows and Vince McMahon gave a babyface speech like he was announcer Vince introducing Steve Austin at Raw, but there weren’t a ton of wrestling references. But it was so clearly a wrestling promoter trying to do pro football with the overselling announcers, trying to get over marginal hits as being killer and selling the rules and the romanticism of the players not being well paid but they get bonus checks for winning (players in real sports get bonuses for winning as well, as getting into the playoffs increases the salaries and each round of the playoffs they get into increases it as well, far more than $2,500 per game, but you don’t hear the announcers spending any time pointing that out because to do so would be annoying). They certainly promoted the gambling angle, as promised, even asking fans in the stands if they bet on games (well, it was Vegas and it is legal there). There is a dark side to this strong gambling angle of encouraging it. Late in the week, one very well connected person told me exactly where and what bets certain people close to the product were making. This is not the insinuation of an actual fix but simply of the fact that in the first week in a game with unknown teams, certain people have knowledge, and can use it for economic gain, which in the long run may not be a good thing. But if people too close to the product start playing that game, problems can arise with the credibility, particularly in a sport where if a gambler has a quarterback in his pocket, they can make very safe bets, and suddenly, it is not worked entertainment, but fixed sport. Sports that have worked endlessly to keep everyone involved away from gambling still have occasional fixes. There is a reason baseball and football shy away publicly from the gambling angle and why players are punished so severely if they bet on sports. A quarterback making $45,000 per year is a far easier target to throw a key interception than one making $4.5 million which is the main reason Vegas placed a $1,000 maximum on bets, but a clever gambler can get around that to a degree. But again, like the injury angle, the fact is, if that was a strong issue, college players who are younger are more apt targets since far more money is bet on that game. The injury and insurance concerns with the game before it started, while very real issues, still would put this league ahead of the more dangerous indoor Arena league play, with players who in that league are earning far less money.

Some positives and negatives:

Positive - Cameras on the field and micing of players and hearing the coaches tell the quarterbacks the play before the play made the game more interesting as a novelty, but by the end of the game, the novelty started to wear out when you had seen enough winded players having nothing to say and annoyed coaches wanting the camera out of their faces.

Negative - They kept on that camera in the first game too long into the plays, so the camera work of plays that went downfield quickly and passes came across like WCW production.

Positive - The quicker time clock between plays made for what came across as a faster paced game, even though it still lasted more than three hours.

Negative - With the announcers either not knowing, or not saying, when plays were called what to look out for, it came across as if they were holding back important info before the play. The announcers not explaining what the plays were made me feel like I was watching WCW announcers not explain angles.

Positive - Fans came to have a good time, and even in a bad game the atmosphere came across as people wanting to have fun.

Negative - Fans came across as total morons. Really. This was as bad as those segments WCW used to do trying to get fans to say DDP was going to beat Goldberg.

Positive - Nobody asked a cheerleader any questions about the game or who she was dating.

Negative - Players trying to do wrestling interviews and that horrible 1980s wrestling pre-taped vignette of the player and the cheerleader. I was expecting Brutus the Barber to come out with giant scissors.

(Assorted Notes)

-The XFL will start airing in Japan on J Sky Sports in March. There are three things that make it newsworthy in Japan. The ownership by the WWF, tying in the Japanese media’s longstanding coverage of pro wrestling in the sports pages and the fact the Memphis team has a Japanese player.

-Figure this. On 2/5, after the XFL’s first weekend was such a major business success with all the hype and strong ratings, the stock fell from $19.40 to $17.81 per share, and at press time was $16.98.

~~~~~~~~~~WEEK TWO~~~~~~~~~~~~

(As covered in the February 19, 2001 issue of the WON)

The XFL went from television’s penthouse to its outhouse in record time as ratings plummeted on NBC to the point the entire league is already being labeled, just two weeks in, a major failure in most circles.

It got so bad, that on 2/12, just eight days after the initial ratings for opening night came in at well above the levels even the most optimistic in NBC expected, that emergency meetings were held after an embarrassing show with a tremendous finish went 45 minutes long due to an alleged generator problem, an injury, and a double overtime.

The prime time rating fell from a 9.49 to a 4.4 on NBC (I believe with the 45 minutes past prime time that actually did better with the close game in double overtime, the final NBC number was a 4.6), going from first place to last place in the prime time race over the course of one week. At press time we don’t have the UPN final number, but it appears to be in the 2.0 range as the overnights dropped 33% (4.2 to 2.8) and last week did a 3.08, again putting it in last place among all network programming and even dueling even head-to-head with Sunday Night Heat. The TNN debut, heavily hyped virtually 24/7 on the network, finished with a 2.4 (a scary figure since RollerJam, with one-fiftieth the amount of promotion, debuted on the same network at 1.7). That would combine give them 8.8 to 9.0 ratings points, already below the 10.0 the XFL had promised advertisers as the season average, basically if they were going to consistently decline, they are at week six or seven level in week two.

There was already much opposition internally at NBC Sports to going into bed with Vince McMahon due to his reputation, so much so that the bigwigs from NBC Sports like the “A” level announcers steered clear of the XFL, leaving the announcing in the hands of basically pro wrestling announcers and a rank amateur who was a cult figures from another era in Brian Bosworth. When the second game forced Saturday Night Live’s biggest show of the year, with Jennifer Lopez as host, to start at 12:15 a.m. on the East Coast, causing the expected near 10 rating for the show to come in at a 6.3, its lowest rating of the year, Executive Producer Lorne Michaels was furious. It was reported in many circles including the New York Times that had Lopez not been there and so much promotion been done for the show, he was willing to shut the show down and tell NBC to just put a taped show in its place. It should be noted that Michaels should have been pleased the previous week as the XFL strong opening week combined with showing a tape of the SNL with The Rock had drawn a tremendous number for a rerun, the previous week.

Jeff Zucker, the President of NBC Entertainment said to the New York Times the next day that “we are absolutely not abandoning the XFL,” and that “We are absolutely committed to it for the full season.” That last statement was scary, because it seemed to indicate the three year commitment of two weeks ago is now down to 11 more weeks. With the announcers being excoriated and the product being viewed as a laughing stock almost universally, it has led to significant drops in the public opinion, particularly among women, in Minnesota over Jesse Ventura’s involvement. But even with Ventura being his trademark ill-prepared, he was hardly the embarrassment that Bosworth is in the same role on the UPN game or that Jerry Lawler was on the back-up game where Lawler clearly had no clue how to announce a football game and hardly the knowledge enough to analyze even though he is a huge football fan, coming across reminiscent of Bobby Heenan did a decade ago when Vince made the call to have him co-announce the World Bodybuilding Championship PPV fiasco. But most important as it pertained by both Ventura and Lawler, hired for their entertainment ability, is neither was the slightest bit entertaining or funny. Matt Vasgersian, who had become a sympathetic media figure as last week went on, even though his first week performance was bad, but he had the background of being a baseball announcer and was being replaced by a wrestling announcer (Jim Ross). In the nearly one quarter that aired, Vasgersian, without Vince McMahon in his ear, was much improved.

The second week was a comedy of errors that actually started the previous night with The Rock on Jay Leno. Johnson, who hasn’t come across embarrassing in public since his ascension to stardom, on the show didn’t know the nickname of the Chicago team in the game he was on the show to plug (Enforcers) the next day, which became painfully obvious. Brought in to give the huge wrestling audience that watched the NBC game the first week, but not the UPN game, some familiarity, Rock did an embarrassing diatribe in Rock-speak telling the suits in the NFL to stick it up their candy asses while there was a sparse crowd in the background, explained on television as being late arriving. Rock also, despite his own background as a college player and in his day was probably equivalent a player as some of the marginal guys in the league, had little to say when brought in at halftime, praising the guys for playing for “peanuts.” At halftime, in the middle of the sentence, he paused and did his trademark, “they’re chanting the Rock’s name,” and you really didn’t hear a chant at all, although there was a decipherable murmur. They switched to a quick crowd shot, which, instead of seeing people chant the Rock’s name, they were laughing.

Stephanie McMahon, no longer a Helmsley, did the attempt at a WWF angle that so was poor and unintentionally hilarious, it seemed right out of the WCW playbook. First, Ventura told us that Jamie Milanovich, the wife of the back-up quarterback for the Los Angeles Xtreme, was five days overdue, and was in the stands watching her husband, and the great moment could occur at any moment. They cut to Stephanie (who replaced the even worse Dara Tones and Carol Grow as the female voice in the stands), reverting back her whitebread early 1999 wrestling character, standing under a helicopter, ready to transport Jamie to the hospital in the event she goes into labor. Stephanie said she was four days overdue. Later in the show, when Milanovich himself was being interviewed about the same subject, and blew it off since the game was on and he was concentrating on that, we found out that Jamie was actually at home.

Then there was the generator blow-out, causing NBC to switch to Vasgersian and Lawler in Orlando for the Rage against the San Francisco Demons for 33 minutes while the Coliseum filled up. At least nobody from the XFL tried to insinuate the problem was due to sabotage from the NFL (remember Eric Bischoff during a power failure on Nitro a few years ago). The credibility started falling when the announcers talked about the sellout last week in Orlando when they never opened the upper deck and claimed a similar sized crowd for the second game. They were actually down 11,500 to 25,049--which did keep the league’s streak of every game drawing at least 25,000 although no word on paid vs. paper and how accurate the announced crowds were. The New York media was reporting that in the Hitmen opener the next night which drew 35,000, that there were 5,000 to 10,000 in the stands by late in the game as people were leaving in droves in what was actually a close game for the home opener. In Los Angeles, credibility was stretched when the Xtreme two days before the game announced it was sold out and people were laughing because they claimed 38,000 tickets sold in a 95,000 seat stadium was a sellout. Then, at game time, the Coliseum was sparsely filled, although by the time they came back from the generator problem, they had a healthy enough crowd to look decent for television and announced the number at a believable 35,813.

Throughout the weekend, the 35-second play clock, an idea on paper that seemed to work the first week to speed up the game, made the game come off amateurish. There were far too many delay of game penalties and a few untimely time outs all weekend called because teams couldn’t get the play off in time. The NBC emergency meeting to speed up the game by changing the rules, keeping the game clock running during change of possessions and starting the clock faster on incomplete passes as well as starting the games themselves five minutes earlier. But it only adds to the league’s lack of sports credibility when a league takes the pro wrestling approach of changing the rules as they go along.

Ross was going to be destroyed in the media for announcing no matter what, between his pro wrestling delivery, the fact McMahon wants the announcers to be shills praising the XFL ad nauseam (how many times to we hear that there’s no fair catches, like every single punt in every single game), and killing Ventura’s credibility with his constant knocking of the NFL when there was not one way, not entertainment, not quality of play, nor production, announcing or anything, that this product was anywhere close to the NFL. After the knocks by the wrestling announcers, when talking about the critics and Dick Butkus was brought in for an interview, Butkus, taking the football people approach, claimed that he couldn’t understand why the critics were so harsh because he said nobody ever claimed they would be as good as the NFL. At another point, Ventura, trying to get over the oft-repeated but rarely lived up to tag of smash-mouth football, made himself look stupid by saying how the quarterback isn’t allowed to slide and how they don’t have pansy quarterbacks who avoid a hit in the XFL. Late in the game, when a quarterback slid to avoid a hit, Ventura sheepishly said they made him out to be a liar.

There were so many mistakes in approach this week it was scary. First off, McMahon drew the huge first week audience based mainly on teenagers and young adults who are WWF fans--75 percent of the first night audience called themselves WWF fans. He promised the WWF mixed with football, but then didn’t provide them with WWF quality of entertainment and thus the tune-out factor as the first game went on was huge, which was the ominous sign even when the first numbers came in strong. Instead of increasing the outside the field entertainment, perhaps spooked by the critics (to the point that while insinuating the most violent football in ads before the season started, the acquiesced to potential knocking of the league by not airing any clips of an apparently brutal injury), they largely eliminated it, which should have, but didn’t please the critics of the first game, but this league has no prayer to make it unless it draws non-football fans. They had less cheerleader shots than the first week. They made fewer gambling references, and didn’t interview half drunk fans in the stands about whether they had bet on the game. In a sense, while all that was probably good, by presenting nothing but a bad football game with generally bad announcing that everyone was considering a bad joke, that isn’t a recipe for success. There was only one pro wrestling interview, by Jamaal Dupp, giving himself the stage name of “Death Blow,” and he came off as that embarrassing indie level wrestler promo. There was an 11-minute delay when Octavious Bishop broke his leg in two places, which they decided against airing a clip of the injury. They did have Kat strip down to a teeny bikini at the Memphis game.

A huge mistake they made was playing up how little the players were earning, which made it come off like a cheap game show, and giving their regular occupations as opposed to hyping their athletic background. People watch pro sports to see larger then life stars who can do things that they themselves can’t do and have special talents. The strategy of making these every day guys, not making much money, made it seem even more like semi-pro ball, like the downplaying of actual NFL credentials that many of the players actually have in favor of saying they were roofers and algebra teachers who went to training camp without getting paid any money, which only made the league look even more minor league.

The first week, the WWF had its solace. They could say the criticism didn’t matter, use the line that bad publicity is good publicity, and claim the critics were eggheads out of touch with the public, using the all important ratings as their holy grail. The second week, the holy grail that determines everything, seemed to indicate the critics, who largely predicted the big drop, knew more than those in control of the destiny of the league, which is a hard pill to swallow for a company used to using ratings--we appeal to the public--not the critics, as their justification.

Can it be saved? I don’t know. It seems the big drop the second week indicated that the prime first week audience, the wrestling fans, weren’t satisfied. If it doesn’t drop from this level, it would be considered not a failure, but not a success either, but USFL history shows the drop doesn’t end after the first week. Trying to attract the wrestling audience will alienate the football audience and be a black eye for the network which after one week of declining numbers was already in an emergency meeting about the project. But that is McMahon and the WWF’s expertise and the hail Mary to save it, The plan seems to be to start building the personalities, highlighting a few guys on each team to try and get them over with the “common man” theme, and it is expected there will be more changes in how the games will be presented. Without it, as the next USFL, you can learn from history. Opened at 14.2, a 7.4 by the second week, and being down to 3.3 by the end of the first season.

More important from a wrestling standpoint, but what does success or failure mean for McMahon’s core product? Success would enable Vince McMahon to be viewed as the greatest sports promoter of our time. He bucked the trend of falling sports ratings with a minor league product and marketed it to the public, which bought it. Failure. Vince becomes the guy who is good at promoting wrestling, who was a failure when he left his familiar world and tried to play in the so-called real world. For McMahon, how he is viewed by the movers and shakers of this world, who don’t give a rats ass about pro wrestling other than this quirky entertainment form that is around but is this fad thing they expect will go away, but certainly care about football, will be determined by this venture. And psychologically, what are the other effects of failure. Of course, like Antonio Inoki, Vince McMahon will always come back in this world. If he’s knocked down. He’ll get up. But McMahon and the WWF’s most loyal followers are not used to also being knocked down. Paul Heyman managed to create a scapegoat in TNN to keep his loyal followers from having to accept the fact that, financially, no matter how much noise 1,400 people could make in a small building, the product didn’t fly economically. The realization that, if this goes down hard, that by their own standards--the ratings--that McMahon’s critics this time had the last laugh in his most high profile venture of his life, will be a tough pill for many people to swallow.

(Assorted Notes)

-CNBC did an interview with Linda McMahon about the XFL. Without saying so, there is an interesting dichotomy to the XFL. As noted from the crowd shots in Vegas and the “two beers for every boy” lines in the newspaper, the beer consumption at the Orlando game was the most of any event ever in the stadium, despite the stadium having an empty upper deck.

-The actual number of viewers for the first XFL game on NBC was 15.7 million, not the 14.1 million number we listed, and the combined of the two games was 20.3 million. There actually was some sort of a stat of 54 million people watching at least one minute of the game which is where they used that 54 million stat on WWF promotions, which is realistically a totally bogus number no matter how one figures things. If a 9.5 rating were to equal 54 million people, than a 40 rating that the Super Bowl drew would equal 227 million people, which is most of the population of the entire country, and I’m sorry, but if Friends drew 27 million people and was one of the highest rated shows of last week, how does XFL, at No. 30, have twice as many viewers by any form of math?.

-There was an article regarding the stock prices dropping after such a successful business first weekend of the XFL. Reasons given, besides the buy on rumor, sell on news, is that people want to get out because critics labeled the XFL opening a bomb, and because ratings for the WWF core product are going down combined with a softening ad market makes any television and radio vehicle tough for growth. There is also the thought that WWF management is being spread too thin and it has weakened the core business. There is validity in that.

-Saturday Night Live after the first XFL game, which was the third showing of the program hosted by Rock, drew a 7.4 rating, which is a tremendous number for a first run episode of the show, let alone a third replay.

-It was reported that Matt Vasgersian in the “A” game last week had McMahon in his ear the entire game, and in particular, whenever Vasgersian would start talking about a player’s NFL background, McMahon started screaming at him not to. The feeling seems to be that since most of the players who had NFL backgrounds with a few exceptions, were failures at that level, that why bring it up. It was said that McMahon had already made the decision to go with Ross by the end of the night.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~WEEK THREE~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(As covered in the February 26, 2001 issue of the WON)

Not only was the huge ratings drop between week one and week two bad news for both NBC and the WWF in the XFL project, but even worse news is examining the demographics.

The NBC rating dropped from a 9.49 rating to a 4.58 the second week, a drop of 52 percent. But more significant is that the audience itself dropped from 15.1 million to 6.5 million, a 57 percent drop due to average viewership per household dropping from 1.61 to 1.38. It dropped again for the third week another 27 percent to 4.78 million. For the third week of play, which was the best overall broadcast to date, the show fell again to what appears to be a national 3.2 on NBC (down 30%--the actual nationals didn’t come out until after press time due to the President’s Day holiday but the fast nationals, which are usually within a tenth of a point either way, came in at this level) and an overnight rating (nationals nor fast nationals not yet in) of 2.0 on UPN (down 40% from 2.8 last week), indicating final numbers probably around a 1.4 or 1.5, a full point lower than UPN averages in prime time. The games were both deeply entrenched in last place on both nights among all network programming. Figuring TNN would also show a drop since considerably less promotional hype went into their second game, XFL will be hovering at about 6.0 to 6.2 total national ratings points for the week, as much as 40% below what they promised advertisers.

If there was good news, it’s that the ratings indicated this may be the last big drop. The NBC game on 2/17 stayed steady the entire first half, dropped a little in the second half before picking up strong for the finish which again came down to the last play, the first game where the ending of the game drew a bigger audience than the beginning. The UPN game on the overnights opened at 1.8 and generally showed growth, finishing at a 2.4 for another game which the outcome was in doubt literally until the last minute. While the frequency of games decided on the last play should be suspicious given it’s a WWF-owned league, the reality is that these games are usually low scoring, which is not what the league would like, but low scoring games by their very nature are going to have the outcome in doubt until late in the game.

For comparison purposes, Nitro averages 1.59 viewers per household and Raw averages 1.67 viewers per household. From an advertiser standpoint, the audience for the second week turned out to be totally different than projected and desired based on the largely youth oriented commercials. The idea that Vince McMahon is the king of attracting Males 12-24 which was the prime audience expected, and delivered, the first week as the show did its best rating, a 10.6, among teenage boys. That audience dropped 70 percent to a 3.1 and the 18-24 males dropped 71 percent by the second week, leaving the strongest demo for the XFL being Men above the age of 49.

TNN, which heavily advertised on WWF programming and has been as a network heavily targeting younger viewers with the “We’ve got pop” campaign, did its best numbers on its debut show among 18-24 males but realistically, both the UPN and TNN shows were similar numbers for all male age groups, not skewing either young or old. The scary part of the second week NBC rating and the 12-24 Male demographics is that there is a slight misleadingly high aspect of the second week because of a huge audience overall, and in that demo, which turned in at 11:30 p.m. for the final quarter hour because of Saturday Night Live and Jennifer Lopez. The rating opened at 5.0 and fell to 4.1 at 10 p.m., which as the game got close, picked up to 4.3. There was growth after 11 p.m., likely people waiting for the newscast and SNL, and the final quarter hour at 6.6, even with the double overtime great finish, still has to be considered mainly the audience tuning in to see SNL. The prime time rating was a 4.39.

The final UPN number for the second week was a 2.09, a 32 percent drop from the debut the previous week. TNN drew a 2.40 rating, which is a very strong number for that network. That translates into 1.87 national ratings points, meaning the combination of the three shows the second week delivered an 8.54 national rating, already well below the 10.0 number sponsors were promised. The first week delivered 12.57 total national ratings points so at this point they are after three weeks already 10% behind what they promised advertisers even with the huge open. If there are positives to be looked at, it was that the TNN game steadily grew last week and the audience for the UPN game was an umbrella effect (grew in the first half, fell off after halftime and ending up where it started). The TNN strongest demo was the target Males 18-24 (2.2) but also 50-54 (2.2) but only did a 1.1 among teenagers. UPN also only did a 1.1 among teenagers with the strongest being 25-34 year old men (2.2).

(Assorted Notes)

-The XFL game on week three (Los Angeles vs. Las Vegas) was easily the best broadcast to date. Both Jim Ross and Jesse Ventura were much improved over their previous two games. Ross was damn good, with the lone exception being he still tried to sell a little hard at times to push the excitement more than a normal sports announcer would and told the same Jose Cortez story twice. When the game was tied going into the final quarter, he said, “This is going to be something special” when it really came across as just a close football game. Aside from that, he called the game far more like a football announcer than his trademark rapid-fire loud wrestling commentary. It was an exciting game decided on the last play, so that didn’t hurt. Ross also, before the last second field goal which decided the game, was already referring to Tommy Maddox as “Miracle Maddox” based on one come-from-behind win the previous week, as part of what it appears to be a last-ditch attempt to sell the product by marketing one or two stars on each team. As we mentioned before the season, the problem with unscripted football, is that Vegas, built around “He Hate Me,” (running back Rodney Smart), to the point two of the L.A. defensive players had their jersey names “I Hate He” and “I Hate He Too,” was the featured player and ended up 24 yards on 15 carries. Either Ventura was a lot more prepared or at least seemed to be because he did a good job of analysis, and even, at points, was funny. Ventura, because of his great voice and delivery, only has to be acceptable in football knowledge to come across well. He and Ross, to their credit, also eliminated the knocks on the NFL, which came across bad in previous weeks, and when Dick Butkus talked about the rule differences, the reference to the NFL was simply “other leagues.” They also cleverly didn’t make the pay scale sound so cheap, instead of talking about players making little money constantly, they talked about how the winning team splits $100,000 (this was said over and over, so it was clear it was a directive) as opposed to saying the same thing but sounding cheaper in previous weeks, that each player on the team that wins gets a $2,500 bonus. The belief is that Vince McMahon wanted Ventura to be less critical of the players and coaches and funnier. He was still critical at points but it didn’t seem unjustified. There was even a point on a double penalty call where Ross and Ventura understood the rule interpretation immediately (of course they do have people helping them in that regard), something the people on the field didn’t know as all the mics on the field showed. Last week, when they had a long injury delay (and they did do a vignette of Octavious Bishop, who broke his leg in two places last week regarding his surgery and recovery, and while not showing the apparent Sid like footage, they did have footage of his ankle at a 90 degree angle from his leg where the break occurred that wasn’t shown last week), it was II minutes of dead air. This time, when a player went down bad enough to stop the game for a few minutes, they immediately went to a planned live dance-off between the cheerleaders for the two teams. There were more vignettes of the cheerleaders, if anything, trying to tone down their slut image some in the media gave them by showing them at work doing regular jobs such as one being an algebra teacher and another work as a court reporter (previous weeks they showed them working at bars). There were no wrestlers at the game and I didn’t recall one pro wrestling reference, which is amazing when you consider it’s a McMahon show, and that Ross and Ventura were calling it. Based on the second week demographics and the general lack of pushing the product hard (there were commercials, but only one reference in commentary) on Smackdown and with the exception of the announcers, no wrestling personalities on the show, it is clear they are no longer attempting to market this hard to wrestling fans, and there is nothing on the shows to really appeal to wrestling fans. They tried to play up a worked feud between Saturday Night Live and XFL with Molly Shannon doing a vignette asking them to end the game in time and Ross & Ventura making cracks about upsetting Lorne Michaels. The sideline interviews were still more misses than hits, but it was better. Two teams that were a lot more cohesive going down to the wire and being decided on a 49-yard field goal with one second left. There were people breathing easy when that kick was made due to all the pub and pressure to end the game by 11 p.m. because if the kick missed, they’d delay the start of SNL again. The second game in Vegas drew a reported 26,135, down slightly from the sellout of 30,000 two weeks ago. On TV during the crowd shots, it didn’t look like quite that many, but it was close enough to full on TV to look good. The Memphis game drew an announced 17,063, cut in half from the debut game in that city, which was not a good sign. The second game in New York fell from 35,000 to an announced 25,626 (although live reports indicated the real number was less than 20,000) and Birmingham fell from 36,000 down to an announced 17,582. This coming week the plan is to do Chicago vs. New York, even though they aren’t the best teams in the league, with the idea of the teams in two of the three biggest markets would be the best game to deliver numbers and it’s also the first home game in Chicago.

-Stats you should immediately discard the next time you hear them: Lycos search top 50. XFL, which played to terribly declining ratings and falling attendance was No. 25 as the most searched for word last week.

-In the Bay Area sports ratings for the last week, the NBC/XFL game (XFL does well above its national average in this market) finished second only to the Daytona 500 for the week. The UPN game, however, finished near the bottom, only beating out of the area college football games.

-The St. Paul Pioneer Press ran a story this week saying that Ventura has an out clause in his contract enabling him to get out if he believes the XFL job is a detriment to his career and had people speculate whether he’d last the season.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~WEEK FOUR~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(As covered in the March 5, 2001 issue of the WON)

While XFL ratings declined again in week four, the slide has finally slowed, but not before a dubious record was set.

The XFL broadcast on NBC on 2/24 drew a 2.61 rating and 5 share, down 15 percent from last week, making it one of the lowest rated show in the history of prime time television on one of the four major networks. The game broke the record set by the 1997 NHL All-Star game on FOX, which drew a 2.8. There was a half hour on April 15, 2000 with the ending of an NBA game and the beginning of a rerun of “Third Rock from the Sun” which did a 2.4, and a holiday special this past Christmas Eve that did a 2.2, but the former was a split half hour, and the low rated half hour of XFL from 10-10:30 p.m. beat that out with a 2.21, As for the latter, Christmas Eve and other similar holidays where viewership is unusually low as a whole are usually not figured into records like this.

The rate of decline has finally slowed so the show has seemed to settle into a rating, but the place it has settled is disastrous. The UPN game this past weekend drew a 1.35 rating, down 12 percent from the previous week. The TNN game stayed almost steady with a 1.09 (which is an 0.85 national rating), down “just” six percent after the monster drop the previous week. The UPN realistic rating was 1.55 (percentage of homes that actually get IJPN that saw the show). This left the cumulative week national rating at a disastrous 4.81, well below half of the 10.5 cum that sponsors were promised.

Third week XFL numbers came in at a 3.08 on NBC, down 32.8% from the previous week, a 1.15 on TNN (which is an 0.90 national rating--down 52.1% from the previous week)--a figure a few episodes of ECW even beat and it’s actually now declining faster than RollerJam, which was at 1.3 its second week, and a 1.54 on UPN (down 26.0% from the previous week) for a conglomerate 5.52, a 35.6% total drop.

After four weeks, ratings overall are 25 percent below what was being projected and that’s taking into account the huge first week

(Assorted Notes)

-The XFL took its first sponsorship hit this past week when Honda pulled out. According to Chuck Bachrach, VP of marketing and programming for Honda’s agency, Rubin Postaer and Associates, the pullout wasn’t over the declining ratings (which means it partially was). They instead blamed content, saying they bought the ads based on the idea they were going to be producing a football game. Their specific complains were too much of a television push for scantily-clad cheerleaders, too much cross-promotion of the WWF during the telecasts and in specific, they felt Dwayne Johnson’s promo at the start of the second game directed at the NFL should never have appeared on a national broadcast. They also felt the make-up of the XFL audience was too downscale for a product they wanted to be associated with, noting the crowd make-up and Bachrach basically snubbing his nose at the type of people they were drawing to the stadiums. In other words, they were disappointed with the ratings and that it is being labeled a flop and they don’t want to be associated with flops but probably don’t have an out clause in the contract on ratings this early on, but do have an out clause based on if they were unhappy with content, because quite frankly, everyone expected the cheerleaders to be more risque based on advertising months before the league started and the cross-promotion of the WWF was also less than most expected. The make-up of the audience probably has more to do with declining numbers at the stadiums and Johnson’s promo made for a convenient target because it came across so poorly to the non-wrestling fan audience as a potty-mouthed crybaby complaining about a product that they can’t hold a candle to as opposed to WWF acceptable trash talking, which by the second week was most of the audience.

-Jay Leno this week said, “Apparently the ratings for the XFL are so bad, the executives said, ‘Just burn the league for the insurance money.” During the week, Vince McMahon was quoted in USA Today as saying that the league wouldn’t be dropped and that NBC shared in that thought process. Kevin Sullivan, the NBC Sports VP, said the network has a two-year contractual commitment, but there is thought they’ll move the games out of prime time at least next season and privately within the company they are said to be looking at figuring out a way out even though publicly they are saying the opposite. Scott Sassa of NBC West Coast in a national press call conference said that NBC is committed to airing the show in prime time for the remainder of its contract. Sassa did an even sadder version of Vince Russo, blaming the ratings on it being Saturday night and the fact NBC appeals to younger more urban viewers that are more likely to be out (belying that the first week those same viewers did a 9.5 and those viewers he was talking about were there at the beginning, and then never came back). He said they are hopeful of turning it around with story about personalities (i.e. Tillman vs. Ventura angle), the same strategy they’ve used for pro wrestling. UPN has a two-year contract, but have an option in the contract to get out after this season and affiliates are heavily pressuring the network to announce it isn’t picking up its option as soon as possible so the stations can line up new programming in the slots. If ratings don’t pick up, there is a chance some or all of the West Coast stations will start broadcasting the game on a three-hour tape delay, so it’ll air in prime time, but the stations will get back their lucrative 6 p.m. local newscasts which have been airing at 8 p.m. Basil DeVito, who heads the league for McMahon, is trying to paint a happy spin, saying last week that the average rating isn’t that far off projections (because of the huge first week, although the gap widens greatly by the week) and it only looks bad because of the first week being so good and raising everyone’s expectations, but that’s ridiculous as it’s the lowest rated prime time show now on both Saturday and Sunday and most of the smart money now is that it’s doomed with no chance of a turnaround. The XFL started make-goods this past week because the numbers for ads have fallen below projections, and the media has made a bigger deal out of that than it really is. It’s not at all unusual for TV shows to at some point have make-goods. The freefall in ratings to this extent is highly unusual, especially since it’s much faster as a decline than even the USFL did in the 80s. Dean Bonham, a major sports advertising adviser who has been negative about the league’s chances from the start, noted the big problem is not the make-goods but that the league was to boisterous publicly about kicking the NFL’s butts and how they would deliver the young male audience that doesn’t watch the NFL. He said what makes the declining ratings so newsworthy is all the hype the league got for itself with those statements. There is also fear that when the NCAA tournament starts in a few weeks.

-The New York Post on 2/25 reported McMahon, desperate for a marquee coup, has talked with Lawrence Taylor about joining the league in some fashion, which was confirmed by Taylor’s agent that the two spoke this week, but the story didn’t say what position they are interested in Taylor for.

-The NBC game with Chicago vs. New York was a total disaster. Two 0-3 teams playing in an empty Soldier Field with cold weather and terrible rain. Since I was travelling, I only saw part of the game and it looked so sad. Ross was even making excuses by the end, saying things like, well we knew there would be days like this when we started this, in reference to the weather. Because they don’t let the announcers in the press box, they were standing out there getting poured on which only gave it a more unprofessional feel. They tried to build a feud, which made the show even more pathetic, between New York coach Rusty Tillman and Jesse Ventura, which they heavily pushed on Raw which made it sadder still. Tillman claimed Ventura knows nothing at all about football, for Ventura’s criticisms of Tillman. Before the game ended, they sent Ventura to the field to interview Tillman, whose team got their first win. They apparently wanted to create the famous Pete Rozelle/Al Davis handshake at the Super Bowl when the Raiders, who were suing the NFL and Rozelle at the time, won, and Rozelle on national TV had to shake his hand. However, Ventura went to shake Tillman’s hand and Tillman blew him off and refused to talk with him. That made everything even more bush league because they had overplayed that spot, talking more about Ventura going to shake his hand than the game itself it seemed by the end. Even worse was in this horrible weather, they had cheerleaders, who they focused on more than ever, wearing the most risque costumes, apparently a desperate measure to keep the teenage male audience that for some reason wandered back the previous week, and that didn’t work as that demographic for Saturday night fell 44% from a 3.9 to a 2.1 from the previous week. They announced the crowd at 24,052 for the game but it was obviously nowhere close to that. That was the total of tickets out for the game, between paid and comps. We’ve heard rumors of XFL games being heavily comped in Chicago and Los Angeles. We’ve heard two figures on the number actually in Soldier Field, one being the 14,856 announced and another saying it was closer to 12,000 and a large percentage of even that being paper. San Francisco remains the league’s hotbed drawing an announced 34,737 for the second game, only a slight decline from the opening week 38,000, some of which is due to the newness of Pac Bell Park. Los Angeles only announced that 18,341 tickets were out (combination of paid and comped) but wouldn’t even announce how many were at the Coliseum, a figure that some have estimated as low as 7,000. The original plan was to air the 3/3 game from San Francisco, but the plans changed to do the New York vs. Los Angeles game so they can continue the Ventura-Tillman deal.

-Paul Tagliabue, the NFL commissioner, who has been quiet on the XFL from the start, spoke his first words at Yale University, saying, and what a bold prediction this is now, that the league will only last a few seasons. “I was asked (about the XFL) by one of the Yale players at lunch and I have to confess, I’ve only seen about ten minutes of the XFL. And I can tell you that it was not the most rewarding way I’ve spent 10 minutes in the last month”.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~WEEK FIVE~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(As covered in the March 12, 2001 issue of the WON)

-Rusty Tillman was very negative about the hyping of a feud with he and Jesse Ventura in an attempt to stop the ratings slide of the XFL. “They’re trying to manufacture something, and I’m not going to do it,” Tillman said in an article in the Newark Star-Ledger. “I’ve said all along, if it’s like the WWF, people are not going to like it. I’m not going to do it their way. That’s not me. I didn’t want to turn around and have an (insult) contest on the field. My wife and children are watching. I’m not going to do it, because I think it cheapens the game.” Tillman was totally uncooperative on the 3/3 NBC game in working the feud, which made Ventura’s attempts to keep it going actually quite pathetic. It must really be sad for all those people who made Ventura their political hero so find out Mr. Tells it like it is is just a paid shill doing pro wrestling angles on TV while holding the office of Governor of Minnesota.

-They added Mike Adamle in the booth for football analysis and when you heard the plays called in the huddle, he actually told what the plays were going to be ahead of time. The two notes this week are that Mike Keller stated the league is looking at for next season signing younger players as long as they are at least 19 years old provided they are not in college due to academic reasons. That is bound to be controversial, but it shouldn’t be. If the player is good enough to play and isn’t playing in college, there is no reason he shouldn’t be fair game. Quite frankly, even if he is playing in college, if he can make more money going pro early, it should be his decision. This was a big deal years ago in basketball and one can debate whether it’s been good or bad for the sport and it’s probably been bad overall for college basketball, but what is fair economically isn’t necessarily something to protect college sports. Baseball players have always been signed right out of high school, as have hockey players, so why is it wrong to do so for basketball or football players, other than in the case of football, college sports are a great minor league they simply don’t want to hurt because it creates future stars for them and they don’t have to subsidize it like baseball has to do. There is a value of a college education, but we all know that in the case of big money sports in college in particular, the college sports programs are so far beyond hypocritical when it comes for a legitimate education for players that people should at least have the option to make a decision about their own lives as opposed to waiting until their college class graduates and going pro. Granted, left up to their own devices, many will come out early and in many cases it will be a wrong decision, but in other cases for a superlative athlete, it’ll be a right decision, and we all make good and bad decisions in life as it pertains to work or school at that age and athletes should have the same option everyone else has. If there are media complaints if they enact this policy, just let me know if a second-rate newspaper gives a job to a brilliant writer even though his college class has yet to graduate if they will make a similar fuss. On the other hand, the big promotion for next week is that, in their own words, hyped throughout the show using their own words as a desperate attempt to deliver ratings, that next week they are going to have cameras in the cheerleaders locker rooms. I’m sure the idea is to do this because for the most part the media has started to ignore the league, and they are hoping that negative press, like in the first week (but clearly not in the second week, which kills the theory that bad press is. good press) will boost numbers. They’ll get some bad press on it, and it may slightly boost numbers (I could be wrong about that because in the days that have followed that announcement, remarkably little has been written mainstream about that subject because XFL isn’t considered a subject worth taking seriously except to point out the ratings by most major city newspapers), but they’ll be disappointed with just how little the ratings will move is my prediction. And by the week after, because they won’t be able to deliver on what is being teased, the long-term turn-off factor will be even greater and the numbers will drop, although I don’t know how much. Three weeks ago, the belief was that a test pattern on NBC in prime time would draw a 3.0 rating. Two weeks ago that was lowered to 2.5. In the dying days of the bodybuilding deal, McMahon switched from guys bodybuilding show to a T&A fitness show (not unlike many of the sports networks do in the mornings), but that didn’t move ratings either and eventually that was the last straw and it died. Wonder if all the Mushnick haters will note that he called this one before almost anyone else and what he said to Drew Pearson when Pearson on “The Last Word” said all that stuff was done before the season to get attention but once the season started it would be all about football and they wouldn’t be doing that stuff anymore? I can understand why wrestling fans don’t like Mushnick but when it comes to predicting McMahon’s actions over the past ten years, I’ve met nobody who has called them ahead of time anywhere near as well. I don’t think it’s sad McMahon is doing this, and in fact, is predictable and expected as he’s not going down without a fight and without exhausting every possible gimmick. But I think it’s so sad that NBC sports is so desperate to allow this hype, no matter what ends up being delivered or not delivered, because no matter whether it works for a week or not, the XFL was going to go down as a bad business decision and as Dick Ebersol’s Edsel. But for the most part, that’s all it was until now. Now it really is a black eye for NBC and NBC Sports that it won’t be able to wash away if and when this thing quietly disappears.

-Linda McMahon, speaking on 3/5 at the Bears Stearns and Co. media investment conference in Boca Raton, FL, made some hints regarding the long-term of XFL, saying they are committed through the end of the first season but would take a look at it on a week-by-week basis. Her statements created some headlines indicating the company was thinking of sacking the league, which she denied the next day. She acknowledged the ratings decline and blamed it on weak games, but said critics are too harsh too early, saying it takes time to build a brand, player awareness and create stars. She said the company has launched audience research to find out why so many viewers no longer watch and said, “I think we have to evaluate the viability of the product in the marketplace.” She said later that the company was committed to the XFL but was just looking to see what the consumer’s appetite is for the product and evaluate from that how they proceed. She claimed licensing and merchandise figures are on pace with the business plan and tickets sold are ahead of schedule but the ratings need improvement.

-XFL failed to break the big record but did set a dubious record on NBC on 3/3. XFL did a 2.4 on Saturday night, which from a record standpoint technically would make it the third lowest rated show in the history of major network prime time television although from a record keeping standpoint it is second (a Stanley Cup playoff game in 2000 did a 2.3) because a 2.2 was registered on a Christmas Eve. Still, the game did set a record for the lowest rated hour in the history of prime time major network television as from 10-11 p.m. the steadily declining rating of the broadcast fell to a 1.9 Even more bad news was that Male 18-34 demo was only a 1.4 and the teenager demo fell from 1.5 the previous week to 1.0. The UPN game fell to a 1.2 (so much for the argument that it is Saturday night that kills the ratings) making it the lowest rated show of the evening then as well, and the TNN game did an 0.9, which would be an 0.7 national number. Overall the cumulative national rating of 4.3 is about a ten percent drop from the 4.8 of the previous week.

-XFL Vice President of Ad Sales Bob Riordan resigned on 2/28 to take a job with the College Television Network owned by CTN Media Group in ad sales. Riordan took the job as WWF started delivering free ads as make-goods due to the disappointing ratings as well as having to lower its ad prices.

-A black eye for the league was on its own web site when doing a Q&A about whether you are interested in cameras going into the cheerleaders locker room, 62% voted no.

-XFL is now offering major discounts on ads as well as make-goods. In one of the trade papers they were talking about the XFL doing a 3.9 among Men 18-49 and thus being strong in the demo group, beating out everything the weekend before last in that group except the Winston Cup. What is misleading about that is they are adding the ratings of three games to get that 3.9 and comparing them with single games or single events in other sports. If every NBA game in every local and national market was added together for a week or even every NHL game, its 18-34 males would destroy that of XFL, but NBA and other sports don’t do it and that’s where manipulated figures can look confusing. It’s not unfair as far as advertisers go because if you buy an NBA game, you buy one game, but XFL sells in package, so your ad appears on all three games so it can claim from an ad standpoint those numbers it is delivering. XFL is also charge less than half of what major sports charge for similar ad audience making it a bargain, but that’s also because it can’t charge even half of NBA rates because advertisers won’t pay NBA numbers. As mentioned here before, the prime source of ratings is for advertisers, but for all the comparisons of NBA vs. Nitro on TNT when it comes to ratings, in the real world, it doesn’t matter (which is why tennis and Dog shows were pre-empting Raw on USA all those years) because advertisers will pay tons more for NBA than Nitro no matter how much Nitro beats them in ratings. As far as what this means for the WWF in dollars and cents, here’s some estimates. XFL figured to lose $60 million this season before the ratings shortfall, which would be a $30 million loss for WWF. That was based on a projection of selling $60 million in television advertising. As it turned out, they sold closer to $40 million. If one figures the ratings stay roughly at last week’s level for the rest of the season (and the ten percent overall drop from that level this week says that estimate is being probably too generous), and estimated the championship game at a 4.5, which may also be very generous, when the season is over, they will deliver about 53 percent of the audience they promised advertisers. They can make up about 19 percent of the shortfall with make-good ads between now and the rest of the season, which would leave them 30 percent short of what advertisers were promised, which would mean they would have to refund approximately $12 million more at the end of the season, leaving them $32 million short of their projected budget. So that would add $32 million to the loss column meaning this project will actually lose considerably more money than WCW did last year, and that’s provided ratings don’t continue to decline from the current level. It would make both the WWF and NBC losing about $46 million each this year on the project provided all other numbers come in at budget, which one would suspect also won’t be the case. With WWF’s profit margin this year on wrestling probably falling between $80 million to $100 million on the wrestling side, they can absorb those losses and still be a very profitable company and it shouldn’t mean the wrestlers should feel any sting in their pocket books, at least theoretically, unless wrestling numbers themselves drop later this year.

-One of the more embarrassing moments in TV sports history took place with the cameras in the locker room and somebody was taking a leak and Ross had to utter the line “that’s somebody going to the bathroom.” That’s been made fun of everywhere.

-Ventura largely put his foot in his mouth last week at the National Press Club meeting when talking about the XFL. He was first asked about why he has so much disdain for the media, and he called the media “jackyls” (he didn’t mean Don Callis), that they have no accountability and only want to report negative stories and care too much about people’s personal lives and try and create stories. The very next question said that doesn’t he feel like a hypocrite with that answer in light of his constant bashing of Tillman. Ventura said that doesn’t count because what he is doing with Tillman is only entertainment and he has great respect for Tillman. Then he was asked why the XFL isn’t succeeding and he blamed the media, saying “Give yourselves a hand, you are the reason the XFL is not succeeding. The constant negative criticism by you guys is the reason the league is not succeeding.” He claimed nobody from the XFL ever said they were going to have a better product in any way than the NFL (what about Vince on the 50-yard line screaming, “Where’s my football” and the constant anti-NFL knocks on the air, many of which Ventura himself made). Then Ventura ripped on the NFLPA because Keith Elias was cut for salary cup purposes, but was willing to play for less than the league minimum to stay in the NFL, but the NFLPA wouldn’t allow him because it would violate the collective bargaining agreement and Ventura said the XFL would succeed because players like Elias care more about the game than the money.

-They changed the bump-and-run rule to the same rule the NFL has in attempt to increase the passing game because the scores have been lower than they want. Rule changes happen in all sports but I’ve never heard of them constantly changing during a season.

-Jesse Ventura blamed the media for the XFL’s ratings failures, although admitted the league was overhyped. He said about the media, “They got embarrassed again. They thought this was going to be football players hitting each other over the heads with chairs. They thought it was going to be wrestling on the football field. Then, when they found out it wasn’t...they had to attack it and say it’s not as good as the NFL--it’s second rate-football,” he said in an AP story. They should have asked him if it was the media’s fault, why is the public turning off in droves? He gave a less than ringing endorsement when asked about the future, saying, “I don’t know, we’ll give it our best shot”.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~WEEK SIX~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(As covered in the March 19, 2001 issue of the WON)

-We only have sketchy XFL numbers for this past weekend. The Saturday night game on NBC, based on all the advertising with the cheerleaders sketch, was the first game in league history to increase its audience over the previous week, drawing a 2.6 rating and 5 share, making it the one of the five or six lowest rated shows in the history of prime time television from one of the big four networks--three of which have been the past three weeks of XFL broadcasts. The UPN game drew a 1.1 rating. We don’t have a TNN rating at press time but it was down in total viewership (which isn’t necessarily the same thing as homes, which the ratings are determined by) by 18.2% That would indicate something along the lines of a 0.60 national number and an 0.77 cable number. With the NBC increase, the cum rating should have held at around a 4.3 but because viewers per household watching were so far down based on the demographic information we’ve received, it appears overall viewership for the three shows was down 11.5%

-This week in the XFL started with them pushing the idea that they are attempting to break their association with wrestling based on the idea that the association with wrestling has hurt the ratings. To get that over, they removed Ross from the “A” game because he was so closely associated with wrestling. This decision was actually made close to a week before it was announced. Vince McMahon did his first interview on the XFL in several weeks to the Las Vegas Review Journal in which he was very conciliatory about mistakes made. He said the rules still need tweaking as well as the television production. Admitted he had gone too far with his negative comments on the NFL. Said the media hadn’t been fair to the league. Called the NBC ratings a serious disappointment. McMahon insisted the league would survive, despite rumors all week that it is unlikely to continue for a second season. There is talk of next season upping the salary scale of QB’s from a $50,000 per year downside guarantee to $100,000 because that is the glamour position and there are some unemployed QB’s with NFL experience that XFL could have had but they were advised against signing on with such a low base. McMahon also said it was a mistake to play up the Ventura/Tillman feud (which didn’t stop them from continuing to hype it on the broadcast on Saturday although not to the level they did in the past). Although Ventura is also associated with wrestling and has far less football knowledge than Ross, McMahon kept him on the broadcast team trying to compare him with Howard Cosell in the early days of Monday Night Football, which is such a joke because there is absolutely no similarity between the two other than both had a strong delivery. Cosell rubbed people the wrong way because he was so pompous in his knowledge, but he was an at times brilliant sports analyst that wasn’t afraid to go against the grain. It’s probably more because Ventura is likely the highest paid guy in the league and in all corporations there is the mentality of having to justify a big contract. The New York Daily News during the week had reported that NBC was trying to save whatever it can of the ratings and give it football credibility (it was apparently NBC’s call to get Ross out) by adding a current NFL star to the broadcast team. Tony Siragusa on 3/12 turned down a proposed offer and there were also talks with Jason Sehorn. It also reported that if there would be a second season, that Ventura wouldn’t be invited back.

-In its advertising for the Saturday night game on NBC during the week, they actually made fun of their own ratings saying “Nobody is watching this stuff anymore,” an ad that many analysts thought was unbelievably stupid to actually buy advertising where you bury your product, which also included a comment “the ratings are dropping like bricks.” The same ad, which in hindsight was hilarious because it came off so much like a WCW angle (more on that later) hyped the good things that were to change as putting cameras in the cheerleaders locker room (as if that type of silly skit will make people take the product more seriously and lessen the wrestling taint they publicly claim to be running away from), stop with hype and fireworks (all still there on Saturday) and stop making fun of Rusty (still played up the Ventura feud, although not as much). The first pro football game ever built around halftime then took place on 3/10 on NBC. The skit was going to have a nervous camera man named “Bruno” (Bret would have been too obvious, I guess) scared about going into the locker room. Finally, when the time came, Vince was there, in his Mr. McMahon WWF heel persona, yelling at him to get in there. Eventually Vince shoved him, the camera man hit his head on the door and was knocked out. In his dreams, he had visions of women dressed in some skimpy clothes for a few seconds. He revived with the cheerleaders standing around him looking concerned. But alas, halftime was over and they had to go back to the field. Vince, mad that Bruno had screwed up his ratings, started putting the boots to him. The skit was so bad on every level, comedy that isn’t funny, a screw-job based on it being the focal point of the advertising, that it came off like something Russo would do. Many have pointed to the ratings decline after the skit as evidence of it being bad, and a little can be said about that except XFL’s Saturday night games ratings have almost always declined in the second half. Even worse, to show just how little NBC cares now, after the primary game ended a few minutes early, they went to the secondary game with Ross and Dick Butkus announcing (poor Butkus is one of the greatest players to ever play, but as an announcer, as shocking as this is to say and to hear, he was worse than Lawler). It was a great game. Chicago was leading hometown Memphis 23-22 with Memphis driving downfield. With 1:10 left, they cut away from the game, literally in mid-sentence, to interview a player in Orlando and end the show so they got off the air at 11 p.m. At most, showing the finish of the game they were showing would have gone over five minutes, made worse by the fact Memphis scored and won with a TD with 20 seconds left. Granted, everyone is sensitive because of that game that went 45 minutes long and screwed up the ratings for Jennifer Lopez on SNL and if that game was not anywhere near completion or the outcome was decided, I could see the decision, but making the decision they did made it show fans who were watching that outcomes are meaningless, and you may be able to promote pro wrestling with outcomes meaningless (although that’s stupid on a different level), but you can’t promote pro sports that way. SNL that night made fun of the league including Conan O’Brien doing a comedy bit where he read fake game scores and his punch line, ‘in case anyone cares” drew a big pop from the audience.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~WEEK SEVEN~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(As covered in the March 26, 2001 issue of the WON)

If ever there was a situation where people watching the same thing saw totally different things, it would be the Bob Costas interview on HBO on 3/14 with Vince McMahon on his new show “On the Record.”

The 30-minute interview, approximately half on the XFL and half on the WWF, saw things get totally unpleasant, both for the host, the guest and the audience watching. It resulted in a take sides situation. Many people tried to cast one as the babyface and the other as the heel, depending upon, probably in the case of the wrestling audience, the predisposed feelings on McMahon. Clearly the non-wrestling audience would view things a lot less sympathetic to McMahon, who came across by the end of the interview, like a guy transforming into ones very eyes from a very confident sports promoter into the almost crazed over-the-top version of the Mr. McMahon character.

The interview about the XFL was very interesting, touching on a lot of key points and both handled themselves very well. McMahon tried to get across the league was a long-term project and a brand name that takes time to build. This is exactly the opposite of what could be said when the discussion turned to McMahon’s main occupation.

Costas did a tremendous job of asking mostly the right questions, and keeping McMahon on target when he was avoiding answering them directly, particularly on the football. McMahon, to his audience and minions, did a good job of, trying to cast Costas as something he wasn’t, a snooty wrestling hater and a representative of all the people who don’t like wrestling, and immediately painted him as a surrogate for Phil Mushnick, the name that hits a raw nerve with his audience. There were valid criticisms of Costas. First, he was not as prepared as he should have been, which McMahon should consider himself lucky, because had he actually watched wrestling, he may have made McMahon look even worse, but even if that wasn’t possible, it would have resulted in a more compelling interview. He was more prepared than the vast majority of mainstream reporters who do wrestling, but not at the level one expects of Costas, and he wasn’t in the league of Michael Landsberg of TSN who has done the best televised interviews with McMahon. But just in basic preparation, he needed to watch at least a full television show pr two and have a little more than surface knowledge of some of the more spectacular things that go on and the knowledge he had from his years as a casual fan. Second, Costas shouldn’t have brought up the Lionel Tate murder case, which we’ll get into later.

The show, which drew a 3.0 rating, up from the usual 2.3 level the show does (Bob Knight also guested on the show and Costas was far easier on him, although he did ask him the important questions as well), turned into a major topic on sports talk shows around the country the next day. In this area, which is the XFL’s strongest market, the strong consensus was that McMahon was a raving lunatic and that Costas was a super babyface. In New York, the reaction was different. Most of the reaction by wrestling fans in polls we’ve seen was negative to McMahon, but not overwhelmingly. It did seem the logic used by those defending McMahon demeanor, as opposed to his points, was desperate at best, because the defense of McMahon’s were largely attacks at Costas for not being as hard on Knight or for the aforementioned points, which don’t exactly disgrace an otherwise strong performance. There is the natural attempt when a situation is tense to transform things into the simple babyface/heel mode and trivialized the basic facts of every issue talked about, and quite frankly, McMahon’s demeanor worked to do that by the end of the show as it negated his strong performance in the first half and his valid points in the second.

Costas opened bringing up the XFL ratings. McMahon said he was pretty sure about the continuation of the league and would hope it would stay on NBC next season. He termed the first year brand building and his defense of the ratings were that the XFL wasn’t typical programming and it would take time. He was hoping for a long run on NBC and said that he takes a long-range approach to business. He admitted disappointment in the ratings. He admitted making mistakes but felt it wasn’t too late, and pushed the calibre of play, saying it was bad at first but now it’s great. That has been his main focus over the past week, the problem is, saying so doesn’t make it so. The play is more cohesive than at the beginning of the season, as it should be, but they lucked into having some very close games that went down to the last play early. The second NBC game couldn’t have been scripted any better, by far the most exciting game all season with a double overtime finish. But the one constant of all these games that were exciting is that the rating on every station dropped significantly in all but one case every single week. If, after the expected first week drop, the league settled down, and started re-growth, that would be one thing, and Costas didn’t seem aware enough about the rating so McMahon was at one point able to buffalo him that they were doing well with Men 18-34 and Costas didn’t know better. The strongest NBC demo in most weeks has been Men 50-54.

Costas brought up how the level of play could be that much better since they are all the same players as in the early weeks. McMahon blamed the early games on not enough training time. Hopefully, if there is a next season, we’ll find out if McMahon is true to his words by whether or not he schedules a few weeks of pre-season games or else his statements that he recognized the mistake will hold little water.

McMahon claimed the NFL would like to steal the opening scramble if they could. I expect if the NFL is on the ball, they’ll steal every good idea McMahon comes up with and ignore every bad idea. This is a great prime time laboratory for the NFL to see lots of different ideas, most, but not all, of which have flopped. Just like the old ABA developed the three-point shot which is now a constant at almost every level of basketball. As for the scramble, if the NFL introduces it instead of a coin toss, McMahon is right. If they don’t, he’s wrong, because they can steal the idea if it is believed to be a good one. He said the live game experience is great and pointed to an average of 27,000 per game. The crowds are probably no better in the early stages in most markets then USFL crowds were, the last football league that challenged the NFL and suffered a similar fate, dying after a few years. To get that 27,000, you have to use announced attendances and local newspaper reports, particularly in Chicago and Los Angeles, indicate announced crowds are heavily exaggerated. He said the play was the best anywhere except the NFL. Most football experts have labeled play at lower level Division I calibre and few football fans believe it compares in speed or play or execution with the top level college games. He said the NFL has been around 75 years and that their average attendance was better than a lot of AFL teams in the early years. That’s probably true, as the AFL struggled for five or six seasons before catching on and merging with the NFL, which only happened after starting a bidding war for marquee quarterback and top college talent, something McMahon has always stated his league would avoid doing. The NFL did also take years to catch on and decades to become the institution in our culture it now is. As McMahon continued on his line about how foolish it would be for anyone to think they could build the XFL brand in one year, Costas never noted that it was McMahon’s company that promised advertisers a 10.5 to 11.0 cum rating the first season. It was Dick Ebersol who promised NBC strong young male demos and a great lead in for Saturday Night Live this season. Instead, in four consecutive weeks they had four of the six lowest rated shows in the history of prime time major network television including devastating all existing records on 3/17, and these weren’t low rated 30-minute shows as part of a night, these were the entire Saturday night block for four successive weeks at record low levels.

McMahon didn’t disagree with Costas statement, which was the Mushnick analysis after game one as to why it wasn’t going to be a television success, saying there wasn’t enough emphasis on the football to satisfy football fans, and