Timothy Birdnow

The XFL, the football league planned to compete with the NFL, has announced its inaugural eight teams. Among them are my hometown, St. Louis Missouri.

Fox Business dishes:

"XFL Commissioner Oliver Luck said the league will focus on maintaining a fast-paced, safer on-field product with fewer game stoppages and penalties. Ticket prices will be "significantly lower” than other U.S. professional sports leagues, he added. The league will begin play on Feb. 8, 2020, the weekend after that year’s Super Bowl.

The eight XFL teams will be based in New York, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Seattle, Tampa Bay, and Washington, D.C. Games will take place at the following venues: MetLife Stadium in New Jersey; Globe Life Park in Arlington, Texas; TDECU Stadium in Houston; StubHub Center in Carson, California; The Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis; CenturyLink Field in Seattle; Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay; and Audi Field in Washington. End excerpt.

I'm a little concerned; almost all of these cities have NFL franchises, and this league can ill-afford to compete with the NFL in prime markets. I understand the need to go into the big market areas, but I suspect it's a mistake to go head-to-head with the NFL, even though the NFL is falling like Bill Clinton's zipper.

New York has TWO teams, so a third is going to have a hard time making headway. Seattle, Tampa, D.C., and L.A. all have teams, of course. And as for L.A. (which got the Rams back from St. Louis) it is not a good sports town in any event; everybody is from somewhere else and they already have their hometown favorites.

This new league should have concentrated on places with no teams, or who have lost teams. St. Louis certainly makes sense. How about Louisville Kentucky? Des Moines, Iowa? There are no teams in the Dakotas, or in Nebraska; perhaps they should have looked into that.

I get it; you need a stadium to play in and a good television market. But going into a major market against the NFL is a bad idea.

Well, their solution is simple:

"The XFL will play its games during the NFL’s offseason and will "complement,” not directly compete with the NFL, he added. The league will fully implement gambling in all states where it is legal. Players will be tested for performance-enhancing drugs."

End excerpt.

Not sure if it will work; nobody really wants to watch football in the summer. It will have to compete with Major League Baseball and/or hockey, too.

Still, I wish this new league well. Somebody had to go up against the NFL, which has come to resent it's own fan base and takes pains to insult us.

I hope St. Louis turns out in support of this. Right now there is a major push to bring a professional soccer team to the Gateway City, an idea whose time has come and gone already. We've had major league soccer in st. Louis on multiple occasions and the franchises have always failed - the Stars, the Steamers, the Heat, etc. Everyone is enthusiastic about soccer until they actually have to support it. Oh, a game or two is fine, but nobody really watches an entire season of soccer here.

Soccer is a European sport, one that is absolutely dependent on the officials. How the officials call the game decides the game, and it is entirely capricious. Soccer is the perfect game for people who believe they should be ruled. The American ideal of a governing entity - be it government or the game officials - as merely an enforcer of limited, agreed upon rules is absent in the game of soccer. In soccer, as in the ideals of liberal social order, the players run about helter-skelter and try to game the rules, often laying down pretending to be injured to get a call. The sport is all about gaming the system. The athleticism of other sports is missing, as is the strategy. It is the sport most suited to the modern regulatory state we now enjoy.

Sadly, the NFL is becoming a similar thing. The officials are becoming an increasing factor in the outcome of games. Teams now look more to maneuvering around the rules than in actually defeating the other team. The NFL justifies this as a "safety" issue and as a way to increase scoring, which they claim the fans are eager to do. The old way of play - grind it out, smashmouth, struggle for every inch - is increasingly considered paleolithic. The new NFL is a dance, a bunch of pajama boys hiding behind the officials and pirouetting like ballet dancers. It's fast, it's high scoring, but it isn't what the American Public wanted. Football used to be the modern Old West. The Law was limited to a Sheriff and a couple of deputies who had to maintain minimal control over a duel between opposing sides, an old range war. No more.

I hope Vince McMahon and the other heads of the new league understand this, and try to restore the old style football. They can't succeed without doing that, in my opinion.

And I hope St. Louis, a liberal/Democrat stronghold in the Show-Me State, does not reject the team. Oh, the fans won't, but the powers that be here may make it so difficult to operate that the team fails. They will do it, too, since they are putting their eggs in the Major League Soccer basket. It's how St. Louis works; the City Fathers decide on something and they discourage any competitors. I remember when the Washington Avenue entertainment district was ramping up; the City tried very hard to discourage it (it was being driven by private businesses) because they had decreed the St. Louis entertainment district would be Laclede's Landing and they didn't like the competition. In the end the Washington Avenue area caught on with younger people precisely because it WASN'T the old-fashioned Landing (a fine place to hear banjo playing and the like).

So, good luck to the XFL! They are going to need it.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:18 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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