• by March 9, 2001

By Adam Bernard

Hockey has been notoriously been low in the ratings - the lowest-rated sports primetime program ever being Game 3 of the 2000 NHL Stanley Cup finals on ABC, which had a 2.3 national rating and a 5 share. Football, on the other hand, has always been strong. Until now. The 2.7 overnight rating and 5 share for Saturday night's XFL telecast came dangerously close to that all-time low.

David Cooper, of the Arena Football League, the 2nd longest running football league in North America, said, "I think fans are sending a message to that league and how they react to that will be interesting."

"It's difficult to start a league," he added.

XFL telecasts have had ratings below 4 for the past 3 weeks, but Jeff Shapes, an XFL representative, says "the 10.3 the first week wasn't any number we talked up, it was an unusual high rating driven by the pre-season hype and speculation. We talked about 4-4.5, and our average is 4.7."

With another week below three, however, that average will undoubtedly fall below the 4.5 promised to advertisers. Shapes noted, "I think we've said all along we're a work in progress, every week we review everything and make changes accordingly that are aimed at delivering the most entertaining product the XFL can deliver."

Entertainment? Wasn't the XFL supposed to be a football league? That was the question that Tracie Chinetti, Senior VP, Director of Broadcast Services for Pro Media, raised before the season started, and it's one of the reasons her company advised Staples, the office supply store that's an NFL sponsor, not to sponsor the XFL.

Chinetti said, "we were very interested in their presentation, which focused on football, rather than entertainment, but when Vince McMahon said 'it's going to be smashmouth, wideopen football. This is not a league for pantywastes,' content was expected to be a problem," she explained. "West coast NBC affiliates were concerned about running games at 5 p.m., due to the scantly clad cheerleaders among other things. Cheerleaders weren't in the pitch. This led us to believe the league would be in more of wrestling direction, rather than football."

Did the XFL fib the pitch?

Chinetti said this also led to the realization that the audience wouldn't be a football audience, but a younger, less professional, predominantly male, wrestling audience. Chinetti says she has recommended advertising with the XFL to some companies, but to do their ads as spot ads. She said that if she were one of the advertisers that was promised a 4.5 rating or better she'd have pulled out by now, stating that they are doing poorly in a stable market. "A whole bunch of two's, or one and a half's, don't equal a 4.5."

The XFL has also been telling lies when it comes to its innovations. Cooper said "a lot of the XFL's innovations aren't really theirs. We (the Arena League) have been putting microphones on quarterbacks for years. We've had cameras in the locker rooms, interview