The XFL touched us all in so many inappropriate ways.
That eight-team pro football league hatched by the WWE’s Vince McMahon and co-facilitated by NBC Sports chief Dick Ebersol kind of flew by us on the TV from February to May 2001.
There was the “Million Dollar Game” for the championship played at the L.A. Coliseum between your L.A. Xtreme and … we’re not even sure who else was there, except there is still video evidence that Fred Roggin, the KNBC-Channel 4 longtime anchor, was a willingly paid sideline reporter and former UCLA quarterback Tommy Maddox was the contest’s MVP.
The reason any of this comes up is that Charlie Ebersol, the 34-year-old son of Dick and an L.A.-based reality TV show producer, decided enough time has passed to examine what happened with directing an hour-plus documentary about its inglorious history called “This Was The XFL,” which ESPN purchased and airs at 6 p.m. Thursday (with reairs at 4 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday and at 5 p.m. Feb. 12, and also available starting Thursday night on WatchESPN).
You may have already seen it promoted this week on ESPN’s “Outside The Lines,” as host Bob Ley called it a “balancing of tongue-in-cheek with real football.” Not so much an “aha” moment but more “ha-ha” now that we supposedly get to see how it really came about and put it in context.
Is there a little revisionist history? Maybe for some of us in the media who live through it, attempted to record it impartially, but fell victim to our own biases as it appeared some involved in the football world were losing their common sense.
Perhaps it’s also history we’d just as soon hope no one else considers repeating. Not as a sports league. Not as a TV rights deal. Not as a project involving human beings. It was kind of a poor reflection on many things.
Or, as the clip shows of then-ESPN “SportsCenter” anchor Dan Patrick summarizing what the media was saying about all this after Week 1: “The XFL is accused of selling out the dark side of gratuitous violence, tawdry titillation, lousy football and scripted low-life garbage.”
The media can stick by that narrative in 2017, but now it has more context as to why players weren’t prepared well enough, but had plenty of incentive to succeed based on paychecks that were leveraged on winning.
That’s one of a couple of things the doc might have fleshed out better, said Tom Luginbill, the ESPN college football analyst who worked as the L.A. Xtreme’s quarterback coach that season under his father and head coach, Al, who is interviewed for this piece.
“The way the games were presented on TV was not the same experience for fans as it was in the stadium, and I don’t know if I ever met a single person who attended a game that didn’t love it,” Luginbill said Thursday.
UPN was also a network that broadcast games, as well as Spike TV. It seemed to be a league just right for a cable channel rather than a national broadcaster.
Luginbill also thinks that if some higher-profile broadcasters were included, it would have “added more credibility to the product.” But NBC’s Bob Costas, quoted throughout the doc as one who stood by his decision to have nothing to do with, now gets the airtime for his “told you so” moments, which may rub some (including Luginbill) a little more as self-serving.
“This Was the XFL” gets more into the how and why it happened, a logical residue of NBC losing the NFL rights fees, McMahon trying to exert his WWE marketing to another sport, and Ebersol’s interest piqued by something crazy.
McMahon and Ebersol go back on camera to try to map it back out, and can easily admit their failures. Ebersol, known much more at NBC for how he seized and developed Olympics coverage, has a legendary TV resume to stand on now when he says in the doc that “we burned our credibility” and “I thought we going to deliver good football ... I don’t believe in my entire career in sports or show business I was ever more wrong. All of us were.”
All of us?
Maybe not from the interviews included here with Costas, former play-by-play man Matt Vasgersian, Sports Illustrated’s Peter King, ESPN broadcaster (and former XFL sideline reporter) Jonathan Coachman and NBC Sports president Ken Schanzer. No one seems to be apologizing, just explaining.
Plenty of F-bombs are also launched in this doc, but ESPN said it will bleep them out. It’s not as if they’re gratuitous. There are only so many ways you can politely call something a cluster-mess.
Signing Day decompression
Luginbill was part of the 11-hour ESPNU coverage of National Signing Day on Wednesday, the event that has become somewhat toxic in how the media on all platforms can overextend itself in giving time and space to 18-year-old high school seniors announcing where they intend to play college football in the fall.
Talk of new NCAA recruiting reforms may change the focus of the first Wednesday in February with an early signing period in December.
Luginbill’s thoughts on how signing day has become what it is and if it has a chance to overcorrect itself somewhere down the road:
“I think any coverage on TV is a direct byproduct of the Internet that provides a medium for fans to follow a part of the game that was never available before. Once it became a fan-driven passion, particularly in some other regions of the country, it became a mainstream thing, and then you have to cover it. Also when you have more players leaving early to the NFL, and high school freshmen come right in and play, fans want to identify immediately with those kids.
“I think the way we have chosen to cover it — and we have for 11 years now — is that you could break it down and argue that seven of our 11 hours on the air were spent on explaining and giving insight into the process, how programs and coaches recruit, what the rules are ... then come the announcements.
“I can put my head on the pillow at night knowing that we tell the kids up front: We want the announcement quick, we want it classy, and want it to represent you well. We don’t want a circus. Can we control it all the time? No. And if they don’t, we can call them out on it. You can’t embarrass a program and a fan base, because you really just embarrass yourself. It’s just one of the negative effects how today’s media has become. This is what it is in today’s media.”
Such as the televised announcement Wednesday by USC linebacker signee Levi Jones. Stay classy.
More media notes on how Super Bowl coverage, Brent Musburger’s next appearance, and interpretations of the Sage Steele LAX comments blowback at www.insidesocal.com/tomhoffarth
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