By Kevin Downey

    Officially, NBC says it has yet to decide whether it will bring back Vince McMahon's XFL football league for another season. 
    Unofficially, all the world thinks the network has already canned the league but has simply forgotten to tell itself, perhaps hoping to avoid the pain of fessing up to the worst sports programming disaster since the beginning of television, if not the origin of men in tights.
    But NBC's disaster is not necessarily a disaster for the idea of an XFL league. 
    While the XFL's plummeting ratings were a huge embarrassment for NBC when the league debuted in February, the games did well on UPN and TNN, simply because the audiences they pulled in for those networks were improvements or at least comparable to audiences of prior shows.
    Understandably then, UPN and TNN would both like to bring the league back.
    The issue is whether McMahon can make the dollars work on venues where revenues would be considerably lower.
    This is the great mystery surrounding the XFL, and the real tension in the air is not so much whither NBC as where's Vince?
    The McMahon camp, normally so talkative, isn't saying anything, or rather anything of substance, regarding the league, and at least one issue, likely the major one, is how the XFL and NBC must go about extricating themselves from their now embarrassing partnership. As readers will recall, NBC is a full partner in the league, as well as its principal broadcaster.
    Most media people thought the XFL was an idea of some promise when it was first talked up, even as Wall Street hooted.
    Many still do. They blame not the league but NBC for the big botch of a rookie season, noting, as have others through the history of sports, that new leagues and new sports generally take years to burrow themselves into the souls of fans. 
    They see salvation in airings out of primetime and off the major networks.
    "It could be on UPN and TNN with targeted ratings," says Lyle Schwartz, senior vice president and director of media research at The Media Edge.
    "I could see it working for that; I just don’t see how the economics will allow it to continue to exist with just a cable network backing it.
    "The question for UPN is what they are doing. They are going out and buying ‘Buffy.’ That’s going to take a drain on their economics, and if they pick up ‘Angel’ with it, that’s a nice deep load there."
    For its part, the WWF says it’s still evaluating the viability of the XFL and hinted at a conference in early March that it may not be committed to a second year, as it had been saying all along.
    The reason comes down to money--and losing it, in particular.
    The WWF and NBC ended up investing about $50 million in the XFL for its first season. That’s $20 million more than they had expected.
    And to make matters worse, revenue fell far short of projections. A few weeks after it got off the ground, the XFL, which handles all ad sales, said that only half of its ad inventory had been sold.
   If the XFL can work out its financial problems, though, most media buyers and analysts think it could become a successful league.
    What worked against it this year was a large build-up that it could not live up to.
    For one thing, NBC had guaranteed advertisers that the games would deliver a 4.5 household rating but ended the season with an average of 3.3. That doesn’t even reflect how badly things got by the end.
    The playoff game only had a 1.8 household rating and the final million-dollar game had a 2.1.
    "What’s going to happen next year, which should have happened this year, is that it will start in a much smaller way," says Andrew Donchin, director of national broadcast at Carat.
    "Instead of starting on top and only having down to go, hopefully they will start, not on the bottom, but on a smaller basis and work their way up."
    The hype was mostly focused on NBC, which risked putting a new league on in primetime. Ratings were lower for UPN and TNN and were far less scrutinized.
    While about half its average, the 1.3 household rating on UPN was only slightly lower than other shows on the network.
    On TNN, the XFL averaged just above a 0.9, which the network says was 48 percent better than it was getting in the time slot last year.
    "They were really saddled with very high expectations, some of which were self-inflicted," says Don Hinchey, director of creative services at the Bonham Group, a sports-business consulting firm.
    "But at the same time, the expectations on UPN and TNN are more in line with what they are capable of delivering.
   "It’s a good match for those networks. It seems to appeal to the UPN audience, meaning a younger demo and action-oriented viewership."
   Terri Ritenour, a sports analyst for Paul Kagan Associates, says: "My gut feeling is that they will come back next season, they will concentrate on giving a solid football game, a solid program.
   "I don’t know that it will be back anywhere on network, much less primetime. But I would expect it back on UPN and TNN and for McMahon to stick by it."
    A spokesperson for TNN says the cable network is committed to the XFL for a second season and even offers that they were pleased with the first year results.
    The cable network had the advantage of airing games on Sunday afternoons. That’s a key time slot for football and may be a reflection of changes coming to the league next year, if there is a next year.
    "There is a very strong opinion by the league, and we agree with that, that you will want to put this on in the afternoon on Sunday, where the football habit exists," says Adam Ware, chief operating officer at UPN.
    Time period shifts are expected to create some problems for UPN since it means convincing affiliates to stick with the league and eat up weekend programming time.
    But that seems the only chance for the XFL to stay on UPN.
    "[A decision] will be made in the next few weeks," says Ware.
    "It fell below expectations. Some stations did better than others. In general, it improved what they were doing in the time period before.
    "But that’s not a terrific comparison. Most stations were not running A or B type of product before."

April 30, 2001 © 2001 Media Life

- Kevin Downey is as staff writer for Media Life.

 Send to a Friend| Printer-Friendly Version
Cover Page | Contact Us