Some bad news for anyone hoping we had dodged a very stupid bullet: Variety is reporting that Vince McMahon’s XFL revival has made deals with Fox and Disney to get weekly games on ABC, Fox, FS1, and ESPN, meaning this dumb thing is one step closer to actually happening. For those who missed the announcement at the beginning of next year, wealthy wrestling man McMahon is bringing back the XFL—a failed extreme take on professional football that hilariously flopped in 2001—with the stated goal of giving football back to “the fans.”
Those of us who follow pop culture know that doing something for “the fans” is almost always code for “catering to the whiniest dicks on social media,” and McMahon’s XFL plan is apparently no different, with him implying that his XFL will ban Colin Kaepernick-style on-field protests and that it will be a “faster” and more “action-packed” game with fewer penalties. Basically, his plan was to target the new XFL directly at the sort of people who liked the NFL better when they didn’t have to think of the players as real people with real opinions who were destroying themselves for the general public’s entertainment (not that the NFL is much better). Also, along with that, the whole thing was fairly explicitly racist, and not just because McMahon is a big Trump donor.
But hey, now it seems more like it’ll actually be able to launch its revival season as planned in 2020, thanks to Disney and Fox. According to that Variety story, there will be back-to-back games on Saturday afternoons, with “two additional weekly games on Sunday afternoons.” At this point, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, St. Louis, Seattle, Tampa Bay, and Washington D.C. are the only cities set to field XFL teams (though, unlike with the NFL, all of these teams will be owned by the league and not individual owners). The new XFL, along with its tagline “More Concussions, Less Politics,” is expected to launch next February.