"This Was the XFL" on ESPN's 30 on 30 tonight

[Mark L. Ford]

I still have my XFL football, not a great ball but looks cool.

And my next door neighbor "still has" his giant San Francisco Demons tattoo in living technicolor across his rather enormous left calf (body part not bovine).
Might've wanted to wait for season two to do that, Dan...

The XFL football did appear in Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2000 sci-fi film, The 6th Day..... the film took place in an indeterminate future era, circa 2017 perhaps, where instant cloning was possible, smoking was outlawed, and the XFL was a successful league. I think that the opening scene, in fact, showed one of the XFL quarterbacks being seriously injured on the field, and villain Michael Rooker cloning the guy before telling him "sorry, time to take one for the team".

[Reaser]

The XFL football did appear in Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2000 sci-fi film, The 6th Day.....

I'm pretty sure that it wasn't the actual XFL football and instead was just a football with the XFL logo on it.

[BD Sullivan]

I still have my XFL football, not a great ball but looks cool.

And my next door neighbor "still has" his giant San Francisco Demons tattoo in living technicolor across his rather enormous left calf (body part not bovine).
Might've wanted to wait for season two to do that, Dan...

The XFL football did appear in Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2000 sci-fi film, The 6th Day..... the film took place in an indeterminate future era, circa 2017 perhaps, where instant cloning was possible, smoking was outlawed, and the XFL was a successful league. I think that the opening scene, in fact, showed one of the XFL quarterbacks being seriously injured on the field, and villain Michael Rooker cloning the guy before telling him "sorry, time to take one for the team".

A change from the usual using of USFL footage for football-themed movies in order to avoid paying the NFL.

[preeths]

A change from the usual using of USFL footage for football-themed movies in order to avoid paying the NFL.

The guys who ended up owning that footage, the USFL's way of making good after not being able to pay them for their work in 1985, are the same ones who made the "Who Killed the USFL?" 30 for 30 special for ESPN. That deal worked out very well for them on the commercial payments alone.

[JWL]

some of my memories of this league-

My father and I were amazed and laughing hysterically (in a positive way) when we saw the Memphis Maniax logo during the logo reveal show (it may have been during a wrestling program). It is one of my all time favorite logos. Shortly thereafter we went to the wrestling store in Manhattan and I bought some XFL gear, particularly Maniax stuff.

Charlie Puleri being booed by the New Jersey fans was interesting and wrong.

I liked the scramble for the ball instead of a coin toss.

That wrestling announcer guy who did the play-by-play actually did a good job. I thought he was a better football play-by-play guy than some NFL play-by-play guys.

[Andrew McKillop]

The XFL wasn't all that bad. By the end of the season the TV broadcasts weren't as annoying and the play on the field was better. I would've tuned in for a second season. Like Reaser, I watched every game that was on TV.

The league's biggest mistakes was the hiring of bad announcers. It's something that even Vince McMahon admitted to in retrospect. The league's all-access broadcasts would've been far more interesting had there been more people in the booth that actually knew what they were talking about.

There were a couple of bad-weather games that were a lot fun to watch. Notably the Memphis at LA game was played on a flooded field. The NY/NJ-Chicago game was played on such a rainy night that the XFL's mid-field logo faded away and reveled a Chicago Bears logo underneath. The league thanked the fans that braved those conditions by giving them free tickets to the Enforcers' next home game. That was also the game that shut up Jesse Ventura and his "feud" with Hitmen's head coach Rusty Tillman.

My favorite logo and uniforms belonged to the Las Vegas Outlaws. There were plans to put a team in Detroit in 2002. I'm curious to what over-the-top name and logo they would've been given. The Detroit Defiance?

My favorite team to watch was Chicago. John Avery tore up the league. They also dug themselves out of an 0-4 start to make the playoffs.

[JuggernautJ]

Some of the rules changes (many of which I don't remember) also bear mentioning.

The kick-off substitute race was... interesting but I liked the idea of punts being live (field-able by the punting team) if caught on the fly.

Also the text on the back of the uniforms was unique.

[Reaser]

The 30 for 30 was pretty good. Probably could have even been 30 minutes longer.

[BD Sullivan]

Week 2 of the league saw the NBC game drag on, which pushed back the start of SNL, which angered Lorne Michaels, not surprisingly. Paul Tagliabue was probably secretly happy because that particular episode had the notorious cartoon ridiculing Ray Lewis and his problems with the law. The video was on You Tube, but has disappeared; here's the transcript:

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/00/00kfunhouse.phtml

[Mark L. Ford]

Week 2 of the league saw the NBC game drag on, which pushed back the start of SNL, which angered Lorne Michaels, not surprisingly. Paul Tagliabue was probably secretly happy because that particular episode had the notorious cartoon ridiculing Ray Lewis and his problems with the law. The video was on You Tube, but has disappeared; here's the transcript:

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/00/00kfunhouse.phtml

I watched that game on TV (though I missed the halt in coverage that was apparently caused by an NBC employee forgetting to fill the gas-tank on the portable generator that powered the transmitter. It was exciting, but it exposed the major flaw in the XFL's rules of replacing "sudden death overtime" with "lingering death overtime" on top of the long delays. NBC, of course, having been burned by the "Heidi game" couldn't switch over to SNL until after midnight.