I think Levy’s comments about the NFL are very true. From a personnel standpoint. Players, coaches and front office talent evaluators desperately want a second pro football league in the states to work. It would be tremendous for the football industry. Right out the gate, it’s hundreds of football based jobs that provide invaluable experience.GregParks wrote: ↑Sat Nov 09, 2019 10:20 pm So, a couple things here:
(a) I thought it was interesting that Levy said "the NFL wants this to work." There was no follow-up from the interviewers on what he meant by that or how he knows that (it seemed like a lighting-round type of questions there so they may have been short on time). Certainly there is incentive for the NFL to have free-agents getting work in another league, giving them more experience and allowing their scouts to see more of players. But there's also obviously a limit on what the NFL is willing to do to make sure a spring league works, as we saw with what happened with the AAF.
From the business side and upper management. Oliver Luck has a lot of friends and backers in the NFL. Luck is close to the Hunt family, John Schneider and so many of the NFL’s high ranked executives. As Sports Illustrated reported. Luck was able to broker a meeting with himself, McMahon and Roger Goodell back in December. Big brother is watching for sure. The NFL had execs watching the leagues game and broadcast testing with the Spring League.
The XFL could change the way the NFL does business off and on the field.
From a competitive standpoint. You see things like an extended regular season and extended rosters as a way of potentially hurting the XFL talent pool. If NFL rosters expand to 60 and there are extended practice squads. That could take a lot of talent off the table. An extended NFL regular season could go deeper into February and push an XFL season back a bit.
The real sign of the NFL competing with the XFL would be them actually starting their own developmental league in the spring. The XFL being around keeps them from having to commit hundreds of millions of dollars to starting another NFL Europe, but if the XFL is seen as a threat, which they will never be in my opinion. The NFL could start their own league just to kill off the XFL.