Vince McMahon might be rebooting the XFL

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Rumors that Vince McMahon wants to reboot the XFL are officially more than just rumors.

Today the WWE revealed to the Securities and Exchange Commission that McMahon has sold about $100 million worth of stock, and that he did so “primarily to fund a separate entity from the Company, Alpha Entertainment LLC, which Mr. McMahon established to explore investment opportunities across the sports and entertainment landscapes, including professional football.”

Translation: McMahon wants to try to create a rival pro football league again. And now he has enough cash on hand to give it a go.

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http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com...lan-continues/

I’m sure this will end well.

I hope he does it. Would be entertaining to see.

I would rather have a NFL Europe again, and expand rosters to allow for sending young guys there for development as other sports do.

Screw XFL.

:popcorn:

Remember Trump couldn't get an NFL team... and that he made Vince's wife some administrator of business or something? I doubt that had anything to do with this though

If the rules about what is a catch, unnecessary roughness, and PI are clear and logical, I'll watch.

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Originally Posted by Rick

I would rather have a NFL Europe again, and expand rosters to allow for sending young guys there for development as other sports do.

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I've been saying something similar to this for year. If they want to develop talent, especially at QB, they need a farm league system like baseball. NFL Europe was a step in the right direction, but it wasn't a full fledge farm league.

With the growing disenchantment of football fans with the NFL this may be a good time to start another league. While I could never see it reaching the level of success that the NFL has had I do believe there is a market for it. Fans that have given up on the NFL still love football, they just don't care for the politics that are slowly killing the league.

Can't wait to watch He Hate Me again. LoL. Not really, I tried to watch it, but I think I'd switched to the WNBA.

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Originally Posted by Nomad

Can't wait to watch He Hate Me again. LoL. Not really, I tried to watch it, but I think I'd switched to the WNBA.

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We all watched that first game ...for 10 minutes.

actually everyone should watch the 60 for 60 about the XFL, it is entertaining how horribly that "league" was run. They didn't even have a rule book until 2 hours before the first game LMAO

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Originally Posted by FanInAZ

I've been saying something similar to this for year. If they want to develop talent, especially at QB, they need a farm league system like baseball. NFL Europe was a step in the right direction, but it wasn't a full fledge farm league.

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You can't run a farm league in a place no one understands or cares about the game and considers all the player untalented foreigners (mainly because THEY ARE.) That's why WLAF was a huge money pit until the NFL finally gave it up as a bad job when all they had to show for fifteen years of throwing good money after bad was Kurt Warner and Jake Delhomme. How many people buy AAA tickets just for the off chance of MAYBE seeing some guy get called up to the majors some decade? How many red blooded Americans would be willing to pay NFL ticket prices to watch a bunch of guys from France and Bosnia get their shot?

If the NFL just wants a farm league it should buy into (i.e. subsidize) the International Federation of American Football, which has teams in 105 countries (nearly half of them European) and on every continent but Antartica, yet had to cancel its 2015 World Championship for lack of funds. If the NFL wants to develop foreign MARKETS, especially in an EU which has a GDP as large as the US, it should do the same, accepting short term red ink as an investment that will pay huge dividends once Europes top athletes can earn as much from gridiron football as from soccer and basketball instead of playing semipro football where even starting QBs don't earn enough to quit their day jobs, much less live the opulent life of a FIFA star.

Which brings us back to McMahon: Setting aside the fact he's never run a sports league (only a TV show with hammy actors) $100 million wouldn't cover the player salaries of one TEAM in an NFL that's ruthlessly smothered/absorbed all its many short-lived rivals for 70 years running. If McMahon doubts that, he need only ask his friend Trump what happened to the USFL when he convinced it to abandon its explicit business model of avoiding competition with the NFL by restricting itself to summer ball in cities that lacked NFL teams: Just another of countless trademark bankruptcies, in under two years, leaving the hidden motive of convincing the NFL to accept the New Jersey Generals as an expansion team as frustrated as the Generals owner and future president who concocted it. I'd suggest the McMahons stick to politics, but they also lost tens of millions trying but failing to make Linda a US senator in consecutive elections, so maybe they should stick to low quality TV fiction.

As for a European farm team though: Ask MLS how many people will pay premium ticket and concession prices to watch foreigners play a foreign game BADLY when the few decent players bolt back overseas to REAL professional ball the first chance they get. This is not Pete Rozelle and Al Davis' marketing juggernaut anymore, just a bunch of billionaires killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

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Originally Posted by Joel

You can't run a farm league in a place no one understands or cares about the game and considers all the player untalented foreigners (mainly because THEY ARE.) That's why WLAF was a huge money pit until the NFL finally gave it up as a bad job when all they had to show for fifteen years of throwing good money after bad was Kurt Warner and Jake Delhomme. How many people buy AAA tickets just for the off chance of MAYBE seeing some guy get called up to the majors some decade? How many red blooded Americans would be willing to pay NFL ticket prices to watch a bunch of guys from France and Bosnia get their shot?

If the NFL just wants a farm league it should buy into (i.e. subsidize) the International Federation of American Football, which has teams in 105 countries (nearly half of them European) and on every continent but Antartica, yet had to cancel its 2015 World Championship for lack of funds. If the NFL wants to develop foreign MARKETS, especially in an EU which has a GDP as large as the US, it should do the same, accepting short term red ink as an investment that will pay huge dividends once Europes top athletes can earn as much from gridiron football as from soccer and basketball instead of playing semipro football where even starting QBs don't earn enough to quit their day jobs, much less live the opulent life of a FIFA star.

Which brings us back to McMahon: Setting aside the fact he's never run a sports league (only a TV show with hammy actors) $100 million wouldn't cover the player salaries of one TEAM in an NFL that's ruthlessly smothered/absorbed all its many short-lived rivals for 70 years running. If McMahon doubts that, he need only ask his friend Trump what happened to the USFL when he convinced it to abandon its explicit business model of avoiding competition with the NFL by restricting itself to summer ball in cities that lacked NFL teams: Just another of countless trademark bankruptcies, in under two years, leaving the hidden motive of convincing the NFL to accept the New Jersey Generals as an expansion team as frustrated as the Generals owner and future president who concocted it. I'd suggest the McMahons stick to politics, but they also lost tens of millions trying but failing to make Linda a US senator in consecutive elections, so maybe they should stick to low quality TV fiction.

As for a European farm team though: Ask MLS how many people will pay premium ticket and concession prices to watch foreigners play a foreign game BADLY when the few decent players bolt back overseas to REAL professional ball the first chance they get. This is not Pete Rozelle and Al Davis' marketing juggernaut anymore, just a bunch of billionaires killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

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Like I said, it was a step in the right direction, compared to having no developmental league of any kind. However, it was not designed to be a full fledged farm like they have in baseball.

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Originally Posted by FanInAZ

Like I said, it was a step in the right direction, compared to having no developmental league of any kind. However, it was not designed to be a full fledged farm like they have in baseball.

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Putting any kind of farm league in a place practically no one follows the sport is moronic. It only makes sense if a league's willing to spill tremendous amounts of red ink in perpetuity just to get wash outs some playing experience against fellow washouts, which the NFL clearly wasn't. Farm teams always made more sense in MLB, because players bypassing college to go directly from HS to the pros was the norm, and your average 19-year-old needs not only more mental but physical development before capable of competing against 30-year-old vets on a field where playing til 40—and WELL—is common.

The SECAA, and especially its many "pro-style offenses" ARE the NFLs farm league, with the great advantage of being (very) profitably self-sustaining so no NFL investment is required. Those who still don't quite make the cut have an ideal summer league available in Canada, where cooler temperatures allow them to play most of their regular season when the NFL is just starting camp (so there's no direct media competition) and fans are not only willing but eager to pay the ticket prices that keep the league operational, again without any NFL investment required.

Europe is ripe for gridiron footballs emergence as a professional and profitable sport. It already has a decades-old semipro league highly reminiscent of the NFLs own semipro origins, and much of Central, Northern and parts of Eastern Europe has a strong fetish for all aspects of American culture (hence my father-in-law practically refuses to buy anything but GM cars, while my mother-in-laws boyfriend proudly owns a Confederate Battle Flag and is probably watching Bonanza reruns at this very moment, as he insists on doing each and every Sunday morning.)

However, it needs an independent native league, not foreign castoffs whose few decent players run home the moment any "real football team" offers them a no-expenses-paid one-week training camp walk-on. The NFL's basically expecting people to pay top dollar for the privilege of watching third team scrimmages: Would YOU do that? And if the answer is "ROFLMAO" why would anyone expect a different answer from anyone who does not ALREADY love football?