Upstart league hoping to sustain ratings

Richard Sandomir

Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2001 | 10:46 a.m.

An ESPN.com poll asked fans "What do you like most about the XFL?" After 157,145 responses, these were the results:

In its first week of play, the XFL demonstrated that intense curiosity, a hyperbolic marketing campaign that vowed a revival of smash-mouth football and an accessible base of avid wrestling fans could generate unusually high ratings.

But can the XFL -- a venture of the World Wrestling Federation and NBC -- sustain what it started this past weekend?

"You won't know if it's a hit or a miss until the third week," said Tom DeCabia, executive vice president of Schulman/Advanswers, which buys media time for advertisers. "The curiosity was there, so people sampled it. But if they leave, they won't get that audience back. If they come back, it's a hit."

Undoubtedly, some first-timers will never return. But NBC does not need nearly all the viewers who were behind Saturday's 10.3 overnight rating to achieve the 4.0 to 4.5 national Nielsen rating it guaranteed to advertisers for the season. (UPN's opener Sunday afternoon produced a 4.2 overnight rating, twice what it usually gets in the time slot.)

"There will be some decay," said Kris Magel, a vice president for national broadcast for Omnimedia, a second media buyer. "Where it levels off is where you'll see who the real fans are. If it does a 3 or 4 but it's highly concentrated with young males, it can still be a success."

According to a Harris Interactive survey of 400 viewers, 75 percent of those who watched Saturday night consider themselves wrestling fans -- but 55 percent said the XFL was worse than they expected. About 45 percent of the audience was under 18; 22 percent was 18 to 24.

The XFL's success may hinge on dramatically improving its quality of play -- or pushing to extremes the activities of its cheerleaders and the technological access to what coaches and players are saying. But it seems clear that the owners' decision to start in February made sense, before the NCAA basketball tournaments, the NBA playoffs and the baseball season.

In 1983, the United States Football League started its 18-week season on ABC in March. It began enthusiastically with a 14.2 national rating but by Week 10 had fallen to a 4.2 and by Week 15 bottomed out with a 3.3.

Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Sports, said, "I think people will keep coming back, sample us, and we'll be better and better." The 10.3 start on Saturday "was 25 percent higher than I thought it would be," he said, made more surprising by the lack of total viewer abandonment of the New York/New Jersey Hitmen's loss to the Las Vegas Outlaws. In the fourth quarter, NBC switched to the Chicago-Orlando backup game.

"No one thought we'd have a rout in the first week," Ebersol said, explaining the switch.

Ebersol defended the use of two WWF announcers, Jim "J.R." Ross and Jerry "The King" Lawler, to call NBC's backup games. He said he saw no loss of credibility to NBC in letting announcers who describe fixed wrestling matches call what is billed as real football.

"The fact that J.R. works in wrestling has no bearing on the job he can do in a sports-entertainment show," Ebersol said.

Ebersol allowed that at Sunday's Los Angeles-San Francisco game on UPN, analyst Brian Bosworth's nearly obscene remark about former President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was unfortunate.

But he backed the use of The Rock, The Undertaker and Stone Cold Austin, three WWF wrestlers, to deliver messages on screens at the stadiums. WWF officials had vowed not to use wrestlers in the XFL.

The Rock suggested that the XFL's critics should be driven by bus to the Golden Gate Bridge and leap to their watery ends.

Ebersol said the change in strategy was made last Tuesday by Vince McMahon, the WWF chairman, at the taping of a wrestling show.

"It was fun stuff," Ebersol said.

Advertisers like Anheuser-Busch and the U.S. Air Force were pleased with the rating and voiced no concern with the broadcasts' tenor.

"They walked the line carefully," said Tony Ponturo, vice president for sports and marketing for Anheuser-Busch. "They want to be different. But I hope they don't get ahead of themselves -- they need to tighten the quality of play, but I hope they're not thinking of how to shock people in the future."

Maj. Terry Bowman, a spokesman for Air Force Recruiting, said the stadiums were filled with many of the young males the service hopes to attract. It distributed 40 game tickets to recruits "and the feedback was very positive," he said.

For the coming weeks, Ebersol said NBC's telecasts would look slightly more conventional, using a 50-yard line camera to establish where the ball is before cutting to its Skycam. But he said racy vignettes between players and cheerleaders would continue, as would the focus on sideline and locker room audio and video.

"You have to have something more than a football game on Saturday night," he said. "Roone Arledge proved 'Monday Night Football' had to be a happening, more than a game." But Arledge had the NFL to build on.

Nadine Gelberg of Harris Interactive said her survey indicated that the XFL would benefit by de-emphasizing titillation and stressing online interactivity with fans and the use of even more enhanced technology.

But like many new, alien ventures, the XFL creates differing opinions.

Stacey Lynn Koerner, a vice president at TN Media, a media buyer, said: "It doesn't need to be good football to succeed. If that were so, the WWF would need good wrestling to succeed."

She said the XFL's appeal was as a "poor man's, gritty football, like what you'd play at the park with your friends where you can smack each other around."