Wannabe contenders
Deborah D. McAdams -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/30/2000 8:00:00 PM
The McMahon family and NBC aren't exactly going where no one has gone before with the XFL. Long before WWFE Chairman Vince McMahon conceived of an early-spring league that would play the sort of tough, gritty football he remembered seeing as a kid, there was an Arena Football League, a World Football League, a Canadian Football League, the World League of American Football and the United States Football League.
Football is rife with alternative spring leagues, but none of them has ever approached the prominence of the National Football League, certainly in television ratings.
Now in its 14th year, Arena Football is probably the most enduring of the alternative football franchises, but it was around for nearly a decade before getting semi-regular coverage on ESPN and its cable sibling, ESPN2. Arena games on ESPN pulled in around an average 0.5 rating/381,000 households last year; NFL games, in comparison, regularly drew 6 and 7 ratings with up to 7 million households.
Arena games on ESPN2 pulled in less than half the audience that those on ESPN attracted. This year, TNN carried Arena Football for the first time, having coaxed the regular-season games away from ESPN in the hopes of filling a hole left by the loss of highly rated NASCAR races.
Ratings thus far suggest it has a way to go. On average, the 16 regular-season games did a 0.3/250,000 households, culminating in a 0.6/461,000 for the final regular-season match between Albany, N.Y., and Orlando, Fla., on Sunday, July 23. Play-off games will be split between TNN, ESPN and ESPN2, with the championship game in August going to ABC.
Ratings are a bit better for the games of the World Football League, aka NFL Europe, but only a few of those games end up on television. When FOX started carrying just the championship game in 1996, it pulled in a 1.7-about 1.5 million households at the time. For the past two years, FOX has added three regular-season games, which averaged a 1.1 rating with around 1.1 million households. The just completed World Bowl did a 1.3 rating with about 1.3 million households.
Television ratings for the Canadian League's championship game, the Grey Cup, were unavailable, as were ratings for the now defunct USFL and the WLAF, but ratings analyst Brad Adgate of Horizon Media says none of those franchises scored impressive numbers.
Says one sports executive about alternative football leagues: "I'm a Bears' fan, but when the season's over, it's over. I'm looking for other stuff. Chicago has had three other franchises, and they all failed. Who is going to go to Soldier Field in Chicago in February on a Saturday night?"
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