Leagues and Governing Bodies
At XFL, Luck must ‘re-imagine’ football
The former NFL quarterback and college athletic director is now commissioner of Vince McMahon’s reborn rebel league, and he and his friends are tackling the issue with some big ideas
Brad Kinzer
When WWE chairman Vince McMahon announced his intention to relaunch the XFL beginning in 2020, he said he wanted to “re-imagine” football.
Last week in Charlotte, the league’s recently hired commissioner and CEO, Oliver Luck, convened a group that included former NFL coaches Jim Caldwell and John Fox, former NFL, USFL and CFL quarterback Doug Flutie, concussions expert Kevin Guskiewicz, sports tech innovator Bill Squadron, and McKinsey & Co. consultant Jason Wright for the first of at least three planned sessions to discuss what that game might look like.
“It’s fun to figure out how we can make the game more exciting and faster paced and address some of those things that fans complain about,” said Luck, a former NFL quarterback, league executive and West Virginia athletic director who most recently served as an executive vice president at the NCAA. “Delays. The length of the game. The lack of rhythm. Fans complain about it and players and coaches do as well. We’re going to try to address those issues in a fairly systematic way.”
Before the session, Luck spoke with SBJ about a few areas he expected the group to discuss in its first daylong meeting.
Pace of play
“One bucket is: How do you speed up the game? And looking at it from the other perspective: How do you cut down all the idle time? That’s about play clock and it’s about stoppages. How many timeouts do you really need? Could you get by with four for the entire game? Do you need to have a quarter break? Does a pro athlete really need a break after one quarter?
“A second issue is how do you bring rhythm and flow back into the game? And that’s as important for fans as it is for players and coaches. If you talk to quarterbacks, they’ll say they want to get in a rhythm. They don’t want to run two plays and then break for a TV timeout.
“How do we make sure we’re supporting meaningful plays, but trying to eliminate non-meaningful plays? There are kicking game plays that we have to take a look at. The NFL and college are also looking at these plays, partly because of health and safety, but partly because if something is successful 97 percent or even 94 percent of the time, it ceases in some way to be meaningful.”
On-field technology
“How are the coaches communicating with the players? Can a player communicate with his own players? Does he have a microphone in his helmet? It’s been a one-way conversation for the 30 or so years that they’ve done the coach-to-quarterback receiver. Should it be two ways? There are a number of things we can do in tech that ultimately will benefit the players.”
Health and safety
“We need to have the highest health and safety protocols possible. Not only is it the right thing to do for the players, but I don’t think the American public will support a league that doesn’t.
“We’ll talk about things like chop blocks. Should we completely eliminate them? College never quite got there. There’s a whole list of things we’re focused on doing. That includes analyzing things like the CFL’s no fair catch, 5-yard halo rule. You don’t see too many punts in the CFL. But it’s interesting because it does at least one thing — it eliminates that blowup. Those are the sort of things that we’ll be discussing with our group.”
