Copy and pasted from this weeks Wrestling Observer Newsletter
There were some very interesting XFL notes in a lawsuit filed against the AAF. Darren Rovell reported on a lawsuit filed by Robert Vanech, who claimed he came up with the idea for the league, and is entitled to either 50 percent ownership or money, and wants his name as the creator to be part of AAF history. He also claimed many of the concepts the league is using were his ideas. In the lawsuit, he claimed that the original plan for the AAF was for Charlie Ebersol to start a new league, and call it the XFL. This explains Charlie Ebersol doing the XFL piece with his father and Vince McMahon for ESPN, as that love letter story that was a very romanticized view was actually done to kickoff his building a league using that name. Ebersol had meetings with both Vince McMahon and NBC, who owned the original XFL. His backers offered $50 million to buy the XFL intellectual property from McMahon and NBC, who were 50 percent owners of the 2001 league. But once they had the meeting, McMahon decided against selling and felt if somebody thought staring a spring football league now was a viable idea, with Ebersol likely saying why he wanted to, Vince figured he could do it on his own. That led Ebersol to start with a new name. As part of his lawsuit, Vanech attached a time line that he put out before the league was formed saying the process would start with the ESPN special, that they would purchase the rights to the name from Vince McMahon and NBC for $50 million, then they would try to raise $450 million in funding. Then his plan for distribution was the WWE Network, with the idea of selling the rights to the two best games a week to the WWE Network. His business plan was built around the main distribution platform that only reaches 1,116,000 U.S. homes worldwide and that is centric to wrestling fans, a large percentage of whom aren’t even football fans to begin with, with the idea they’d get paid by WWE and that a football league would increase the subscriber base. Wow. He also wanted to go to McMahon to help provide seed money for the project. He also proposed streaming PPVs of the games for $5 per game or $43 for the season. He also wanted to go to cities that didn’t have an NFL team so they could be the local pro football franchise, which the AAF did while the XFL is going into major markets and NFL markets. The good side of this is they got far superior TV deals with two games on CBS and regular games on TBS, which has full cable coverage, and the NFL Network, which is in nearly 70 million homes in the U.S. and is a station that is completely football-centric. This past weekend, which was week three of the season where you can kind of see where they are settling in, they averaged an announced 14,000 attendance per game but there’s no way of knowing how legit that number is, and were doing the Saturday night prime time game did 491,000 viewers and Sunday against the Oscars did 515,000 on NFL Network
Oliver Luck did radio in D.C. this past week regarding the XFL. The only real information is that they will be announcing the TV deal shortly. He said there will be four games every weekend, and all four will be nationally televised. He hinted two would be on network television and two would be on cable stations with wide distribution. He also said that there would be a one point, a two-point and even a three-point conversion after touchdowns, and none of the conversions would be kicking
They’ve also done an about face on other things. Vince’s original speech was that nobody who did stuff like kneeling during the anthem would be allowed in the league as well as nobody with a criminal record of any kind. So the guy who started the entire kneeling thing, Colin Kaepernick, is being negotiated with. They also wanted to sign quarterbacks at around $300,000 and there’s no way in the world they’re getting him for anything close to that price after the settlement he just got from the NFL, which was reported as being between $60 million and $80 million. At the first meeting, Kaepernick asked for $20 million to even consider playing and things stalled from there