The Newest XFL Ratings Data Is In And It’s Not Good

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Many had high hopes for the reboot of the XFL, the third time the league has launched. This time, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is the public face of the league, and it seems to have quite a few decent football players.

Former college stars like Oklahoma’s Landry Jones, Alabama’s AJ McCarron and James Madison’s Ben DiNucci are playing quarterback for various teams.

The league is set to have ten games for each team and run through the Spring.

But, if TV ratings don’t improve, the league is doomed to fail as its predecessors have.

Here are more details, courtesy of Pro Football Talk.

Via Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, the viewership for the second week plummeted by 50 percent. The four games, televised by FX, ESPN, and ESPN2, averaged only 643,000 viewers.

In 2020, the drop from Week One to Week Two was 34 percent.

All games finished under one million viewers. Sunday’s San Antonio-Orlando contest led the week with 781,000 viewers. The Thursday night game pitting St. Louis against Seattle generated only 542,000 viewers.

In 2020, no XFL game finished until a million viewers until Week Five.

Attendance also has been sluggish for XFL 3.0. Via Kevin Seifert of ESPN.com, 12,011 showed up in Orlando, 11,675 in Houston, 10,386 in Seattle, and 6,023 in Las Vegas.

Through two weeks, that’s average attendance of 12,712.

Yeah, that’s not good. It’s tough to see the league surviving. I’m not sure how much money has to be lost and how many leagues have to fail for people to realize that spring pro leagues won’t work.

Garrett Carr BroBible avatar
Garrett Carr is a recent graduate of Penn State University and a BroBible writer who focuses on NFL, College Football, MLB, and he currently resides in Pennsylvania.