C’mon. C’mon. This is not ever actually going to happen. You know it isn’t!
We had a shot at not allowing the dumb lizard-brain impulse toward bare sensory stimulation to call a deeply stupid and brazenly phony publicity stunt into actual physical being back in the summer of 2015, when it would have been easy enough not to loan a certain apricot-faced lifelong deadbeat the political credibility that, like a steady paycheck or a modicum of genuine respect, he could never in a billion years earn for himself. We blew it! And look where it has gotten us. The world is two minutes from nuclear annihilation, according to the Very Serious Clock Men. Great job, us.
If Earth still exists in two years, and still contains humans, and those humans still have nice things like electricity and broadcast media, there will not be an XFL. A decade from now, if the seas have not risen to reclaim the works of the recalcitrant jumped-up mudskippers who once slopped forth from their briny homes to make war on the upper atmosphere, there will still not be an XFL. Likewise when the sun rises on the next century of this dumb project, should it ever be stupid enough to do that! There will not be an XFL. There’s not gonna be an XFL.
This is a worked shoot, my good buddies. For all the proof you need, repeat the particulars of Vince McMahon’s ostensible plan, out loud, to a skeptical audience, like say on the bus or whatever. A “family friendly” alternative professional football league, with no TV contract, that will exclude players with criminal records yet somehow still find eight 40-man rosters’ worth of athletes good and skilled and competent enough to play a brand of “quicker, simpler ... safer” football with “fewer infractions” and at a high and telegenic enough level to draw football-stadium-sized crowds, and all of it organized and pitched around those players agreeing not ever to kneel or sit during the national anthem—a marginal part of the presentation of a football game that a good 98-percent of football fans happily spent waiting in line for hot dogs or finding their seats or picking their noses for all the long decades of the NFL’s explosive growth into America’s secular religion, and which a fractional smattering of whom only began pretending to care any particular which way about less than 18 months ago. All of it launched and overseen and funded by the leathery pinhead who has spent the past half-century not turning professional wrestling into one of the most popular sports in America, despite never facing direct competition even a hundredth as rich or powerful or entrenched as the NFL—the doofus who tried to launch a bodybuilding league and wound up getting indicted for it. Yes. This is a real thing that definitely will happen.
Did you get through all that with a straight face? Did you persuade any of your fellow riders? No you did not. And that is because you are not someone whose job for nearly 40 years has been to say and perform ridiculous statements and emotions in ways that will suspend the disbelief of crowds of strangers. But Vince McMahon is! Does that seem like it qualifies him to launch and run a “family friendly” alternative to the NFL? No it does not. That is because it does not qualify him to do that. Which is to say that he is not qualified to do that.
But the XFL already happened, you are saying. Clearly he got this deeply stupid thing up and running once, which implies he could do it again. Yes. It is true that Vince McMahon already suckered some number of rich idiots, and possibly a smaller number of regular idiots, into believing that the world had an appetite for a second, shittier, Poochie-the-skateboarding-dog-ass football league, long enough for it to fail spectacularly on its baloney nominal terms and succeed spectacularly in its truer mission of making Vince McMahon somewhat more famous than he’d previously been when he returned to his primary business concern, which is selling professional wrestling to teenagers, and selling their attention to the makers of Mountain Dew Code Red so that the makers of Mountain Dew Code Red can sell Mountain Dew Code Red to teenagers. That is not a reason why the XFL will happen again. That is a reason why the XFL will not happen again.
Don’t fall for this. Please don’t fall for it. Oh god, you’re going to, aren’t you. You’re going to gawk it into existence. You asshole.