Filed under: Sports Business, Sports Business and Media
If you haven't already done so, get a calendar and circle Feb. 3. It's the 10th anniversary of a sports breakthrough that should not pass unnoticed.
The XFL sprang to life Feb. 3, 2001, with its first game. I know, most of you think that's like commemorating the birth of New Coke or "Rosemary's Baby" -- assuming Rosemary had a girl and dressed her in a G-string.
Sure, the brainchild of rasslin' king Vince McMahon had its flaws. But history shows it deserves some due. For one not-so-glorious spring, the XFL gave us a partial glimpse where football was heading.
It was eavesdropping on locker rooms long before "Hard Knocks." He Hate Me would have been a Twitter god. The league was heavy on sex, violence and personality. You know, all the things NFL fans love.
If only the football and its image hadn't stunk, the XFL might have had a chance.
"The quality of play wasn't the best by any stretch of the imagination, but that shouldn't have been a surprise to any football people out there or any writers," Jim Ross said. "It was like every team was an expansion team."
Ross was the TV voice of the XFL. He came over from the WWE Empire to lend some wrestling zest.
McMahon and NBC figured football and pro wrestling would make a nice mix. It turned too cheesy for football fans. There wasn't enough schmaltz for the Jesse Ventura crowd. If it had been a loser-leave-town match, the XFL would have been banished to Pluto.
"I think people expected somebody to jump out of the stands, get out on the field, grab the football and score a touchdown," LA Extreme punter Noel Prefontaine said this week. "They expected something pretty crazy."
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Herschel Walker's MMA career continues to confuse those outside the sport. The former NFL and college star is attracting the eyes of many media members who haven't bought into MMA as a legitimate sport, but at what cost? John Canzano can't be the only newspaper columnist thinking 
This evening the New York Times published an 
Charlie "The Spaniard" Brenneman hasn't broken into the mainstream just yet when it comes to his mixed martial arts career. The lightweight will try to improve on that image tomorrow night on the Fight for the Troops 2 card on Spike. 
The title of strangest WTF story of my morning is 
Netflix is interesting because it is the first service to follow the disruptive arc of the iPad. Every time the iPad is analyzed, the projections are anywhere from just plain wrong to what amounts to a niche. Doesn?t run applications? now there?s an AppStore. Doesn?t run Flash? now there?s a Flash converter app. Apps don?t support a magazine subscription model? Tuesday they will. Won?t be accepted by IT? 80% penetration. Will be overwhelmed by Android tablets? Apple will Verizon them with iPad 2. What is reminiscent of iPadnomics is the speed with which the disruption is underestimated, the naivet� with which the backlash is orchestrated, and the resultant vaulting of the service into a near-incumbent position before the deposed incumbents can retrench from the initial mistaken counterattack. Netflix is already at the stage where iTunes was when the music cartel tried to cap it. While Amazon may be a cheaper service without so-called DRM, there's no device comparable to Apple TV at the end of the value chain. 
For a card with plenty of toss-up fights, Ultimate Fight Night 23 has some pretty big numbers on the betting board. Remember the odds are set to balance the public's opinion on the fights. The public is a little shaky on its perception of some these battles. Let's see if we can find some underdog value.
Ever since the iPad came out, print media companies have been feeling their way in this new medium, but so far they've just been stumbling over themselves. They are latching onto the iPad as a new walled garden where people will somehow magically pay for articles they can get for free in their browsers. But if they want people to pay, the experience has to be better than on the Web, and usually it's not. This sorry state of affairs is true for both magazines and newspapers. The New York Times iPad app, for instance, is gorgeous but crippled. All the links are stripped out of the articles, even from the blogs. Meanwhile, most iPad magazines are little more than PDFs of the print issues with some photo slideshows and videos thrown in. They end up being huge files?I recently downloaded a single issue that was 350 MB, some issues of Wired are 500 MB?with the same stale articles as in the print version. Replicating a dead-tree publishing model on a touchscreen is a recipe for obsolescence. 
It turns out Oprah has a half-sista from another mista! Oprah revealed on her show Monday morning that she has a half sister, named Patricia, whom she did not even know existed until last October. "I thought I'd seen it all," Oprah told her audience. "But this, my friends, is the miracle of all miracles." Patricia, who resides in Milwaukee, Wisc., had been searching for the identity of her mother who gave her up for adoption. She discovered the talk show queen was her half sister in 2007. Upon Oprah's discovery that "literally shook" her to her core, she immediately made plans to meet with Patricia. Oprah, who finally met Patricia last Thanksgiving, said she was living with her father, Vernon, when her mother gave birth to Patricia. 