Vince McMahon announced that he'd be rebooting the XFL recently, leaving plenty excited and others scratching their heads.
Shane Douglas has both worked for Vince McMahon, and been rather outspoken in regards to him publicly. He's not sold on the idea of Vince McMahon's newest football venture and the question marks surrounding it, as he pointed out on a recent episode of the Triple Threat Podcast.
“From where I sit and look at it I don't see the WWE as a wrestling entity anymore and I know he'd say we are not wrestling we are Sports Entertainment. Call it whatever you want to I don't see that the WWE is just rolling along on autopilot so well that nobody has to be concerned with pushing it forward. To the contrary and I would argue more than ever that somebody needs to grab it by the reigns and really focus on how to do we move the WWE to the next point and how do we reinvigorate our fan base, how do we draw those fans back that tuned out the (tens of millions that have tuned out) and what can we do and how can we do we get them back? I would argue that this is the last time and the worst time for Vince McMahon to be talking about starting another side project that draws even 10% of his time away from the WWE and let’s face it I am sure it will be far more than 10% of his time. “
“To take it a step further the first time the XFL failed miserably. I had the chance to see the 30 for 30 on the XFL and it rekindled a lot of the things I had forgotten about the XFL. Vince is saying it is going to be a spring based league and not bring things from professional wrestling like the nicknames on jerseys and the coaches having angles. Based off of what Vince said in his announcement, what makes Vince McMahon believe that in the Spring fans of football are going to be willing to tune in to see a Spring based league after we've already seen the USFL with multiple billionaires (including Donald Trump involved) and including some of the best players in football that year to include the Heisman Trophy winner and some of the best players coming out of college that year and yet they couldn't make a real go of it. So what makes Vince McMahon believe that in the spring two years from now people are going to want to see 2nd, 3rd or 4th tier players who couldn't make it to the NFL play spring football? That is a big question mark to me.”
Current plans have the XFL to return in 2020.
You can hear Douglas' full podcast at this link. Thanks to Chad and John for the transcript.
