He Resurrect Me

Wow, the XFL is coming back. You can just taste the skepticism. If you've forgotten - or just blinked at the wrong time - the XFL was an attempt at a new football league to rival the NFL, but folded after one season.

Many people are noticing that this revival is in many ways the opposite of the original. That league tried to play up the bad-boy reputation of players, while this one will ban anyone with a criminal record. The first one tried to make the game only part of the show, portraying the league as a big reality show. Now they're changing rules to make the game shorter.

I really doubt that criminal ban will last long; they'll have enough trouble finding players to begin with, and eliminating any talented players who fell off the straight-and-narrow is going to cut off a lot of potential recruits. Shortening the game could be good though; it's the sort of change that most sports could benefit from, but wouldn't have the courage to enact. Since there's a long history of rival sports leagues bringing in innovations that are later adopted by the main league (like the original XFL's on-field cameras) that could be this XFL's contribution.

The general feeling is that this is not going to succeed because they can't get around the problem that sports is about stardom, and fans want to see the best players, so a secondary pro league won't survive. But I don't know about that. Leagues like the MLS and CFL survive despite everyone knowing that they don't have the best players in the world at their sport. Of course, they have the advantage that the best players are in other countries, but the XFL will have the advantage that while they are playing in the spring, the best players are on vacation.

But I think there's another reason why a second football league could succeed. Consider college football. It's very popular, despite having a lower skill level than the pros. Of course, it has a few other advantages, such as the loyalty of alumni, and the fandom of people from pays off the US that aren't represented in pro sports (Alabama, Oklahoma, Nebraska etc.) But there's another thing it can offer that the NFL can't: weird teams that haven't been honed to an efficient but monotonous perfection.

College football still offers oddball approaches you never see in the NFL (successfully.) It would be great to see a professional league with teams using the triple option or running quarterbacks. So I think there could be a niche for a slightly odd, spring-based rival league.