Baseball may tag itself as America’s pastime, but we love football. In prior years we have had to wait months for meaningful football once the Super Bowl ended, but not this year! The XFL made their 2020 debut this weekend and I thought it was a great start. Being New York based, I wanted the New York Guardians game to be the first XFL game I watched this weekend and it did not disappoint me.
Of course, the Guardians beat the Vipers so that helped my viewing experience, but I’m not going to really break down the game. However, a lot of the traditional adages of football still applies to the XFL, such as a good quarterback certainly helps you win. Matt McGloin of the Guardians was certainly much better than Aaron Murray of the Tampa Bay Vipers; at one point I asked whether he was going to throw more interceptions this year than other Tampa quarterback, Jameis Winston.
Despite, that piece of commentary about the Vipers’ quarterback, the product on the field was not as bad as I expected it to be. Perhaps just as importantly, I thought the broadcast was exceptional. Fans saw a great deal of things that I’m sure they would like to see in the NFL. We were able to hear the refs speak to each other when they huddled and even communicate with the review official; when you couple that with the fact fans were brought into the review booth and saw exactly what the crew was looking at, it gives fans a sense of validation for when the ref finally makes the call on the field. Fans were also able to hear the coaches call the plays to the quarterback on occasion, which was a really neat experience, and sometimes humorous. You simply never know what kind of combination of words you are going to hear a coach come up with in his play design, like when the Vipers coach called a play called 67 Gopher Burst.
In terms of differences between the XFL and the NFL rules, there are some innovations that are different enough to separate the XFL from the NFL, but not weird enough to turn fans off from the XFL. A number of NFL fans don’t really care about watching the kicker attempt an extra point attempt; the XFL took that aspect of the game out of their league. Instead, the scoring team has the option to attempt a one point to three-point score after the touchdown, each attempt from a further distance than each other. They can go for one point from the two-yard line, two points from the five-yard line, or three points from the ten-yard line. There are others but this one is my favorite and is going to be a very interesting source of strategy as teams become more comfortable with their personnel and playbook.
I do not know if I watched great football today to be honest, but I do know that I had a ball watching it; and that is a positive sign for the XFL.
