Football minor leagues have a bad track record, but the XFL is mounting a comeback with the hope that its new rules will be a gamechanger.
XFL commissioner and CEO Oliver Luck has been tasked with"reimagining the game." By Rick Maese Rick Maese Reporter covering a variety of subjects, including health and safety, Olympics, legal and political issues in sports Email Bio Follow May 10 at 7:30 AM Last winter, a Connecticut businessman had a new idea. Rather, he had an old idea once again.
The first iteration of the XFL was launched in 12 months with more attention paid to marketing than the on-field product. On the giant heap of failed football leagues, it’s perhaps the most notorious, remembered for its brash launch and whimpering demise. Eighteen years later, XFL officials are betting that the landscape has changed and by reimagining the game, they can both avoid the AAF’s fate and improve America’s most popular sport.
Steve Spurrier was one of the high-profile coaches to join the Alliance of American Football, but the league folded during its first year. ‘I want to reimagine the game’ Nearly every new outfit in the football marketplace tries to differentiate itself. The new leagues can’t offer the NFL’s level of talent, so they tweak the format and presentation.
He would also have individual discussions with football lifers like Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh, flying to Ann Arbor to ask, “Given a blank slate, what would you change?”After three months of conversations, the XFL began compiling data and charting ways to improve. To speed up the game, they considered a running game clock and a play clock as short as 25 seconds . They targeted a game time of two hours and 45 minutes, with three times more action than an NFL broadcast.
“Think about it, if a team is down by 18 with three minutes left, you won’t change the channel because it’s still a two-possession game,” said Sam Schwartzstein, the XFL’s director of football operations and a former Stanford offensive lineman. “It’d be hard, but it’s possible.” XFL commissioner and CEO Oliver Luck and XFL President and COO Jeffrey Pollack talk during the announcement of the league's Los Angeles head coach and general manager on May 7. ‘It’s a good opportunity for football’ The next step for XFL officials was to put it all into action, seeing which rules worked, which needed more thinking and which should be abandoned.
The league’s coaches were on-hand to get their first glimpse of XFL football. Before he agreed to coach the Dallas franchise, former Oklahoma Coach Bob Stoops had lengthy discussions with Luck about what the XFL’s brand of football might look like. He was promised it’d still be “solid, good football that our country is used to watching,” Stoops recalled, though with some adjustments.
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