So, Vince McMahon is proof of something the Cubs last reminded us of a couple of years ago with Chris Coghlan–a bad idea repeated is still a really bad idea. He’s bringing back the XFL, the league that brought us guys paralyzing themselves chasing after their equivalent of the coin toss, He Hate Me, football in February at Soldier Field, ratings that even the WNBA could laugh at, and Tommy Maddox.
McMahon’s press conference was shockingly free of snarling, and if Vince is going to be on TV and not threaten to beat up Bob Costas or scream unintelligibly into a microphone, really, what’s the point?
His new XFL doesn’t have a TV contract yet. The league is going to own all of the teams again. There will be eight teams. If you’ve been convicted of a felony you can’t play in the league. The season will not overlap with the NFL. Players have to stand for the national anthem.
Oh, of course they will. This whole league is basically MFGA. Make Football Great Again. It’s no surprise, since McMahon’s wife, Linda, is Administrator of the US Small Business Administration, and is a member of Donald Trump’s cabinet. Think about that. And ti’s only like the 12 millionth most fucked up thing about Trump’s presidency.
If McMahon sticks to what he laid out in the press conference, this league is going to be boring. Sure they’ll put cameras anywhere, but ESPN had 100 cameras for the college football national championship. They had them in all eight end zone pylons, they had them in the first down marker. They even had a live feed of Nick Saban’s colonoscope and we could see how quickly he was digesting those oatmeal cream cookies he eats for breakfast.1
So a few crazy camera tricks aren’t going to hack it. Fortunately, I have some ideas for Vince that will surely make the XFL a success this time.
No stupid blue concussion tents. Dragging a player who has just been knocked senseless into a blue pop-up tent on the sidelines is unseemly. In the XFL we perform CTE tests right on the sidelines in full view of the fans and the TV cameras! I know that presently there’s no way to perform that test without removing the victim’s brain. But hey sonny, that’s the price you pay for leading with your head, and it’s proof of just how committed to player safety the XFL really is.
Eliminate the senseless commercial break-kickoff-commercial break sequence during games. I know that football needs commercials to survive, and, I know advertisers are desperate for live event advertising when people might actually not be able to fast forward through the commercials, but this sequence where there’s like four seconds of action in six minutes of real time is the worst. So, in the XFL here’s how we fix that. We tie the kick return into the advertisements. Ever see those videos of Ed McMahon doing live read commercials on the Tonight Show?
It’s like that, only more violent.
Say the advertiser for the kickoff is Procter and Gamble. We’ll set the line to gain at the receiving team’s 30. If they don’t advance the kick past the 30 they lose, if they do, the kicking team loses. So, instead of going to a boring commercial, we stay on the field, but somebody on the losing team has to eat a handful of Tide Pods. Like you wouldn’t watch that?
If the sponsor is Papa John’s, the coach of the team that fails in the kickoff challenge has to coach the rest of the game with a 16″ pizza shoved into his pants.
You know Budweiser is going to sponsor the shit out of this league since it’s football geared at uneducated white men with bald eagle tattoos. If the kicker kicks the kickoff out of bounds he has to chug a sixer of Bud Light Lime and then kick it again. Only this time both the kicker and the ball are teed up on a Clydesdale.
This shit is going to get M*A*S*H finale ratings, every week.
Vince wants to keep games to under two hours. To do this, you’re not only going to have to have the clock run on almost everything until the last two minutes of every half, but you’re going to have to do away with halftime. But, no halftime, no halftime shows. Given that a hundred million people are going to watch these games, that’s a huge loss of revenue. But, who says you need a halftime to have a halftime show?
Why not just make it so the huge XFL logo at midfield is actually a platform about two feet above the rest of the field? You can have music acts, and marching bands play, DURING THE GAME, ON THE FIELD!
How great would that be. Bon Jovi’s out there butchering “You Give Love A Bad Name” for the 107,000th time and a linebacker on the Baton Rouge Duck Dynasties intercepts a pass and just tears ass right through Richie Sambora on his way to a 60 yard TD return.
What’s your favorite marching moment of all time? You bet your ass it’s Kevin Moen of Cal running over the Stanford tuba kid while the announcer screams, “the band is on the field!” In the XFL a band is ALWAYS ON THE FIELD! And, in the interest of safety, if one of the band members gets hit in the head during a game we’ll kill him and test his brain for CTE on the sidelines, too.
Games should only last as long as they are exciting. I Tweeted about this last week and the response was incredible. Everybody thought it was a great idea. I got letters from news anchors telling me it was the greatest idea they’d ever heard, not that they can admit that now. Sorry, this whole thing has me dangerously in our current president’s headspace.
But I did Tweet an idea about this. Let’s use current NFL teams as the example. If the game is Steelers-Patriots you know it’s going to be exciting, so that game can be three-plus hours. Nobody’s going to mind because it’s going to be fun to watch.
But what about Bears-Browns? Three minutes, tops. Maybe you would sit through that. Maybe not.
Anyway, before every XFL game we’ll look at the matchup and put a not too exceed time limit on it. Two 6-0 teams? They get all two hours. Two 1-5 teams? We might call that one right after the kickoff.
Guaranteed snow games, every week. It’s something we’ve always known, but this past December proved it beyond all doubt. Fans will watch any teams play if it’s snowing hard enough. The Bills and Colts played a terrible game in heavy snow in Buffalo this past year. And, it was awesome. Look how cool it looked.
So in the XFL we’ll pick one game every week at random and we’ll snow the shit out of it. Even if it means we have to play the game on a soundstage where we can blow fake snow all over the place we’ll do it. You’re gonna love it, and you’re gonna watch it. Don’t pretend you won’t.
Fans get their say. Why do idiots watch The Voice and Dancing With The Stars? Because they get to vote on stuff. American Idol is coming back, for chrissakes. So in the XFL we’ll let fans vote on shit on an app on your phones. You want the El Paso-Juarez Wallers to run a triple reverse? Vote for it! You want New Hampshire LiveFreeOrDies to fire their coach halfway through the second quarter? Vote for it! You want the coach who had to shove the kickoff pizza into his pants in the first quarter to have to eat it in the fourth. Vote for it! Oh, it’s gonna be great.
A new level of relegation. In European soccer leagues, the teams who finish at the bottom of the standings get sent down to a lower league. We love that idea in the XFL, but we’re gonna take it up a notch. Whichever team finishes last doesn’t just get kicked out of the league. Nope.
We’re deporting them! So what if they’re all American born and have full citizenship. We’re sending them to Haiti, never to return! And not just the players. We’re going to deport the players, the coaches, the trainers, the cheerleaders, and two lucky members of that team’s fan club.
The XFL. You gotta want it!
Come on. You know you’d watch this.
