DECEMBER 2017 WRESTLING DISCUSSION

[Nice Guy Eddie]

49 minutes ago, PetrolCB said:

I’d rather watch the roster play weekly 2-on-2 foosball. 

 

or Seinfeld

[Johnny Sorrow]

Look, Vince is like my Dad in this way. They'll never not want to be working and will never retire. If this alpha whatever   is the thing he wants to work on as he lets HHH eventually run things,  then fine. 

[(BP)]

If Vince is really going to give it another shot, he's definitely going to target reactionaries as his core audience, up to and including using his access to others' political capital to do so. The only thing that could stop him would be Paul and Steph convincing him it's not worth the bad publicity and embarrassment that would ensue. 

[odessasteps]

Maybe he can get a small business loan to start this league. 

[piranesi]

The idea of Vince McMahon starting a football league because there are people who think the NFL isn't violent enough and isn't politically reactionary enough for their tastes is the most Starship Troopers thing to happen in real life since Paul Verhoeven made Starship Troopers.

[odessasteps]

He might as well just make a real life version of Rollerball. 

(since Shane and Paul E  were in the remake, I had to check to make sure Vince wasn’t a producer.)

[HumanChessgame]

 

[Brian Fowler]

1 hour ago, piranesi said:

The idea of Vince McMahon starting a football league because there are people who think the NFL isn't violent enough and isn't politically reactionary enough for their tastes is the most Starship Troopers thing to happen in real life since Paul Verhoeven made Starship Troopers.

Fuck, Vince should launch a league playing that hand ball/football/murder hybrid from Starship Troopers.

[evilwaldo]

1 hour ago, (BP) said:

If Vince is really going to give it another shot, he's definitely going to target reactionaries as his core audience, up to and including using his access to others' political capital to do so. The only thing that could stop him would be Paul and Steph convincing him it's not worth the bad publicity and embarrassment that would ensue. 

This is what I think will happen.  Master P talked about starting a league.  If Vince can get access to cash like below (you just know he is going to run this through the SBA) and people sympathetic to Kaep then he has his base capital.  

Maybe he goes for a street product like 7 on 7 with three linemen to save roster costs.

Vince is crazy enough that I think he will give it one more try only because it is Vince.

1 hour ago, odessasteps said:

Maybe he can get a small business loan to start this league. 

 

[OSJ]

Damn, I don't want to rain all over this parade of speculation, but this simply isn't going to happen. First of all, you need to have cities to host teams, that means finding a metropolitan area large enough to provide an audience for the games so you don't wind up broadcasting the embarrassing spectacle of half a stadium filled with people who came dressed as empty chairs. There's a lot of negative things that one can say about the NFL, but being stupid when it comes to carving out marketable territories is not one of those things, in fact, the only two metropolitan areas that are likely to support a football team and don't have one are probably Las Vegas and Hawaii and there are lots of good reasons why neither area have NFL teams.

So, we can agree that launching this product in today's environment is going to cost a phenomenal amount of money. Where exactly is this money supposed to come from? The WWE coffers? The McMahon family fortune? A Nigerian businessman named Papa Oommaumau? No publicly traded company is going to throw money at such an ill-advised venture. Vince is a millionaire,  not a billionaire, he's also married and lives in a community-property State. I really don't see Linda signing off on this particular bit of jousting with windmills. 

And lastly, the talent pool... Who is going to play in this league? With the exception of one pretty decent player who seems to have been blacklisted by the NFL, the most talented players are in the NFL making great money. Your next most talented guys are in the CFL and doing okay. Next level down are playing Arena Football and they aren't starving to death even if they're unlikely to become millionaires. When you get below that level, you'e looking at guys that are playing Australian rules football or working as bouncers at sleazy strip clubs. Not exactly a group that people will spend good money to watch play but likely the only group that would be affordable for a start-up like this. The idea that the funds would be available to raid the top players from the NFL, CFL, or even the cream of the Arena League is just ridiculous.

To summarize, you have a product with no worthwhile places to play,  not enough money to fund launching the product and no worthwhile players to participate in this new league. No, I'm afraid that a body-building league would have a better chance of succeeding...

[Casey]

30 minutes ago, OSJ said:

Damn, I don't want to rain all over this parade of speculation, but this simply isn't going to happen.

Yeah, it will. It'll fail, again, but it's going to happen. Vince has to see an idea through to completion before he just gives up on it. We've seen this, time and time again, that he'll sink millions and millions of dollars into things that any sane person could see won't work out well. Bodybuilding, the original XFL, Linda's political campaigns (which I guess did pay off eventually...), etc.

Also - there's no way Colin Kaepernick joins this league. This will 100% have the approval of someone we can't talk about, and that probably won't sit well with Kaepernick. He has a lot of avenues to explore now that he's becoming a bigger "name" than he ever was in the NFL if he never did what he did.

Hell, just base it in the South, be ultra patriotic and violent, and let That Guy in the White House attend or promote a few games, and there ya go. Short of basing it in the South, that's what I see happening. He's going to advertise this towards those fans. And if you think those fans don't exist, the ones that have stopped watching because of the protests or because there's "too many rules", you're flat out wrong.

[Raziel]

6 minutes ago, Casey said:

Yeah, it will. It'll fail, again, but it's going to happen. Vince has to see an idea through to completion before he just gives up on it. We've seen this, time and time again, that he'll sink millions and millions of dollars into things that any sane person could see won't work out well. Bodybuilding, the original XFL, Linda's political campaigns (which I guess did pay off eventually...), etc.

Also - there's no way Colin Kaepernick joins this league. This will 100% have the approval of someone we can't talk about, and that probably won't sit well with Kaepernick. He has a lot of avenues to explore now that he's becoming a bigger "name" than he ever was in the NFL if he never did what he did.

Hell, just base it in the South, be ultra patriotic and violent, and let That Guy in the White House attend or promote a few games, and there ya go. Short of basing it in the South, that's what I see happening. He's going to advertise this towards those fans. And if you think those fans don't exist, the ones that have stopped watching because of the protests or because there's "too many rules", you're flat out wrong.

It doesn't even need to be based in the South.  There are plenty of areas in the North that will flock to it if you get someone on Breitbart to write "that Vince's league is the Patriotic league and watch that instead of that Unamerican NFL" and there's a audience right there.

[Beech27]

49 minutes ago, OSJ said:

There's a lot of negative things that one can say about the NFL, but being stupid when it comes to carving out marketable territories is not one of those things, in fact, the only two metropolitan areas that are likely to support a football team and don't have one are probably Las Vegas and Hawaii and there are lots of good reasons why neither area have NFL teams.

Fwiw, the Raiders are already moving to Vegas.

Regardless, this is all phenomenally stupid, and will be received as such. Maybe a right wing football league could work, but the XFL is still linguistic shorthand for a hilarious failure. No one wants to be attached to that.

[Casey]

2 minutes ago, Beech27 said:

but the XFL is still linguistic shorthand for a hilarious failure. No one wants to be attached to that.

Probably the exact reason that it'll be re-branded as a previous failed brand in the UFL.

[Victator]

People are not going to watch shitty football for politics, 

[Raziel]

11 minutes ago, Victator said:

People are not going to watch shitty football for politics, 

I dunno, People stopped watching NFL for politics, several in my family.

[evilwaldo]

48 minutes ago, Raziel403 said:

I dunno, People stopped watching NFL for politics, several in my family.

 

3 hours ago, Beech27 said:

Fwiw, the Raiders are already moving to Vegas.

Regardless, this is all phenomenally stupid, and will be received as such. Maybe a right wing football league could work, but the XFL is still linguistic shorthand for a hilarious failure. No one wants to be attached to that.

 

3 hours ago, Casey said:

Hell, just base it in the South, be ultra patriotic and violent, and let That Guy in the White House attend or promote a few games, and there ya go. Short of basing it in the South, that's what I see happening. He's going to advertise this towards those fans. And if you think those fans don't exist, the ones that have stopped watching because of the protests or because there's "too many rules", you're flat out wrong.

There is an irony here of a football league based in the South appealing to liberal Kaep fans who are turned off by the NFL's politics.

Now I really want to see this startup for the resulting firestorm.  Get your popcorn kids, this is gonna be good.

[Mister TV]

3 hours ago, Raziel403 said:

It doesn't even need to be based in the South.  There are plenty of areas in the North that will flock to it if you get someone on Breitbart to write "that Vince's league is the Patriotic league and watch that instead of that Unamerican NFL" and there's a audience right there.

That audience is pretty small and most of them want their football teams to look like the early 1960's Washington Redskins. The XFL2 will most likely be wrapped up in the flag but it's still going to be predominately African-Americans playing the games, that's the biggest issue the Breitbart crowd has with the NFL when you start peeling back the "un-American" onion.

If Vince puts out a similar product to the first XFL no network broadcast or cable will pick it up and they'll have issues finding players. If Vince does some sort of 8 on 8 version of football with a ton of scoring and a pretty straight forward presentation someone might take a chance on it.

[evilwaldo]

7 or 8 to a side is the best way to keep salaries low.  3-4 players per side plus backups shaves 12-16 people off the rosters.  That can be a good chunk of salary.  20-30% of a 53 man roster which is not small change.

[hammerva]

If you were going to be a moron and create a new football league, the logic choice for you big name free agent is Kaepernick.    That will get attention.  The problem is that if you are creating a football league to appeal to overly sensitive Trump snowflakes then that is the worst idea possible.   

And if the market is so ripe for a new football league, explain to me how the Arena football league that has existed for over 20 years goes from about 10-12 teams to 6 in one year with two teams being owned by the same people 

[mattdangerously]

4 hours ago, OSJ said:

Vince is a millionaire,  not a billionaire,

Actually, he's back to being a billionaire again.  He's apparently worth around $1.6 billion now.

3 hours ago, Casey said:

Hell, just base it in the South, be ultra patriotic and violent, and let That Guy in the White House attend or promote a few games, and there ya go. 

An endorsement from the President would be the surest sign this will fail.  Just ask Luther Strange and Roy Moore.

[S.K.o.S.]

4 hours ago, OSJ said:

the most talented players are in the NFL making great money. Your next most talented guys are in the CFL and doing okay.

This isn't untrue, and I'm not trying to make any point with respect to the XFL here, but I feel it undersells the gap a little.  From a 2014 SI article:

For perspective: Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan took home $42 million last year, enough to cover the salaries of every CFL player.

[Casey]

20 minutes ago, mattdangerously said:

An endorsement from the President would be the surest sign this will fail.  Just ask Luther Strange and Roy Moore.

It's a little different, though. In an election, there's multiple sides voting against each other. If.... someone.... endorsed Vince's new league, all they'd need are his followers (or whatever you want to call them) to watch and they'd do fine. All the league would be competing against are other shows airing at the same time and the NFL, obviously, instead of against people who might outnumber or oppose their views and that motivates them to get out and do something about it.

All I'm saying is that there are actually people who have stopped watching the NFL because of the protests and all that other shit. Hell, if this starts up tomorrow and is ultra patriotic and violent, there's a good 20-30 people within my social circles that would for sure support this. They'd watch it, while sharing posts on Facebook about how "kneeling during the anthem is a crime and please sign this petition to tell the NFL to grow a pair and punish these guys".

If we're being realistic, Vince should go the opposite way and open up his own racing league since NASCAR is losing popularity. I'm sure he has Bob Holly on speed dial on his flip phone.

[OSJ]

12 minutes ago, Casey said:

It's a little different, though. In an election, there's multiple sides voting against each other. If.... someone.... endorsed Vince's new league, all they'd need are his followers (or whatever you want to call them) to watch and they'd do fine. All the league would be competing against are other shows airing at the same time and the NFL, obviously, instead of against people who might outnumber or oppose their views and that motivates them to get out and do something about it.

All I'm saying is that there are actually people who have stopped watching the NFL because of the protests and all that other shit. Hell, if this starts up tomorrow and is ultra patriotic and violent, there's a good 20-30 people within my social circles that would for sure support this. They'd watch it, while sharing posts on Facebook about how "kneeling during the anthem is a crime and please sign this petition to tell the NFL to grow a pair and punish these guys".

If we're being realistic, Vince should go the opposite way and open up his own racing league since NASCAR is losing popularity. I'm sure he has Bob Holly on speed dial on his flip phone.

Do try to cultivate a better social circle.

[Casey]

I'm going to move to Knoxville and become best friends with @MORELOCK. He'll be the Trent Baretta to my Chuckie T.