Sodboy13

I think the XFL - USFL comparison is apples to oranges, for the reasons noted in the article. I also would be surprised to see the USFL hit anything close to those numbers this season. If you'd prefer a comparison entirely within the 2023 sports media landscape, the NHL All-Star Game aired two weeks prior to the XFL opener in the same time slot on the same network, and pulled in a nearly identical audience volume (1.5M vs 1.54M.)

It's not looking great for XFL 3.0 out of the gate. https://www.sportsmediawatch.com/2023/02/xfl-ratings-opening-weekend-fewer-viewers/ Ratings across all four games averaged about half of what XFL 2.0 got in its debut week, with similar time slots and network distribution. As the article notes, those 2020 ratings did not factor in out-of-home viewership, either, so that's twice the eyeballs on fewer measured outlets. Reported attendance was in the 12,000s for three of the games, with San Antonio doubling the field at 24K+. St. Louis should be a solid draw at the gate as well, but I don't know if any of the rest are going to build on these numbers. Obviously Vegas is going to be the league's Mullett Arena. It's also worth noting if there is an expectation for the TV and in-person audiences to grow over the season, that would basically be bucking the trend of every alternative football league to come through over the past 49 years. XFL 3.0 has been a real puzzler for me. Say what you will about Vince McMahon (and you can and should say A LOT,) but you could at least see the direction and vision he had in his two attempts. 2001 was "Football for the Attitude Era" with all its wretched excess, and 2020 was more "Football made accessible with ideas for a better game." And of course, the USFL attempts to deploy the nostalgia hook, however limited the reach may be on that in this case. Since Rock Ex-Wife Capital has taken over, it's been "Merge with the CFL somehow" and when that fell apart, it kinda became "Well, we paid for the IP, let's run a football league I guess." Everything about this go-around has just felt so bland, like the marketing peaks at "Here is also some football." We know the steak isn't going to be USDA Prime, the least you could do is offer me some sizzle. Kudos to the DC crowd for at least livening things up with their end zone lemon party. Be weird, have fun with it, that's how you build something here. Maybe the league maintains its audience or even grows it a bit over the season. Or maybe the network financial interests are willing to look past the numbers and keep throwing in money for any sort of unique live football programming at this point, like Fox has done for the USFL. We're in very weird times for the economics of sports broadcast rights, after all. But if I were a betting man, as the XFL constantly encourages me to be, I'd set my money on this version fading fast without ever burning brightly.

Online tinkling contests pushing a USFL vs. XFL narrative? Goodness, make like a DC Defender and touch grass.

I've seen the ad patch/sleeve patch swap going on with another team as well. I think it was the Angels.

Frederick Sawbones, logo is a Brandiose'd Mohammed bin Salman swinging a hacksaw like a baseball bat, boom, done, that's lunch.

This was two problems on display at once. By going with two sets of jerseys for each conference instead of one set for each division, you had every player on both wearing the same helmet, socks, and pants, so they wouldn't have to make a full outfit change from the first game to the second. The second problem was making both uniforms half-white. The originals were teal/white and purple/black, so no matter which way players were facing on the ice, you had a degree of contrast between the teams. Anyway there should have been teal jerseys and hot pink jerseys and I'm salty about it.

Going to make a historical correction here. The USFL was already down bad by the end of the 1983 season. Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Washington were disasters. The league approved a six-team expansion for '84 without worrying too much about looking into their new owners, so long as they had the cash on hand for the expansion fee, because they were desperate for money. They were constantly trying to renegotiate their broadcast rights deal from a point of zero leverage. And then Chicago's owner went and traded franchises with Arizona, the new Blitz owner sold off to a doctor in Milwaukee who did not know what he was buying, he unloaded it and suddenly both the Blitz and Federals were league-owned, and... well, I could go on. There are books. Bottom line, the league was already on fire, and Donald Trump merely drove into it with a tanker full of kerosene. What can I say, guy loves his trucks.

And the name kerning on the navy alts is a certified nightmare.

Well, that's gross revenue, not net profit.

I can't remember where I saw it, but I remember earlier this week reading the USFL took in a reported $10 million in revenue for 2022. That's an underwhelming number against Fox's 3-year, $150 million investment, and that's me being polite. If they're doing $10 general admission and kids get in free again this season, and we don't see any advertisers on those tarps and sideline banners, that tells me this is an enterprise uninterested in growth or sustaining its own revenues, and entirely focused on sucking up as much of that sweet Fox money as possible while technically putting out a football league. Which, hey, that's not really a criticism. Good on them for finding that much dumb money! We're fully in Grifter Late Capitalism now, so I'd rather they'd go after the big marks than scam the common folk.

Putting the Maulers in black and gold makes it look like they're some unofficial nickname for the Steelers, sold on T-shirts by some second-tier local Barstool wannabe. It simply doesn't look like a real team now, and it serves as a visual cue that they're trying to ride the coattails of the established local favorite, much like the old and failed Pittsburgh Power of the Arena League. And to do all this to bolster your local bona fides or whatever while playing your home games in Canton, which is closer to Cleveland than Pittsburgh in both distance and identity, is absurd. If you're messing with the legacy branding now, you could just rename them the "Ohio Maulers" or something, keep the colors, and say you own purple while pointing to the orange as a connection to the state's two other pro teams. As @raysox points out, this is attempting to have it both ways and succeeding at neither. Brian Woods pigeonholed the league at the outset by leaning hard into its legacy identity, to the point of ongoing legal action, and now he's out changing stuff because suddenly the legacy identity isn't important to him for whatever reason. Why change the Showboats' colors if they were replacing a red-silver-black team anyway? Whatever, I guess, Fox Sports was too dumb to recognize what it was putting its money into, and too committed now to get out.

That new XFL is... Lordy, I don't even know. I am a certifiable alternative football league weirdo, and everything about it just comes across as so bland and boring. Logos, uniforms, promos, website, all of it just a dull mush.

Rhuigi Villaseñor gives us a hockey jersey fashioned after paisley bandanas. The style of Virgil Abloh gave us Los Angeles Rams uniforms with name tags and intentionally off-centered rough stitching. Alexander Julian gave us pleated basketball shorts. The worlds of fashion and sports fashion no doubt have some overlap, but there definitely needs to be some pretty firm separation between the two as well.

This really is simultaneously trying too hard and not trying hard enough. Just a mess of ideas shoved together. https://twitter.com/ArizonaCoyotes/status/1615393751576510464?s=19

Icethetics posted today that the All-Star jerseys are going to be the mid-'90s "star" jerseys, recolored with hot pink and aqua, orange RR shield at the neck. Solid approach to it. As for the Canucks, I don't get it. Why screw up your throwback just enough.to make it a technically new jersey that looks worse? This looks like a failed Reverse Retro attempt.

Plus the font they chose is quite '80s. That's "Moonlighting."

Which is why when I say that they took Mariano's and basically turned it into Dominick's, it means nothing to you, but it means something here, man.

Immediately better by finally ditching all of that '90s-style text. Not great, but better. Now, bring back the pig butt shoulder patch already.

That looks like the jersey for an ACHA Division 3 club at a school whose accreditation is suspect. Christian University of Downstate Appalachia.

Now that someone pointed out the black numbers provide color balance with the teal pants, I get it and like the look even more. The head-to-toe teal looks much better IRL, but I also think it's one of those colors that will have some vastly different appearances depending on arena lighting, so we'll see how it shows up in the Shark Tank. I also think we're a year or two away from an inevitable all-black alternate, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the helmets and pants from that paired with the primary teal jersey on occasion. We used to give actual grades for unveilings around here sometimes. This one's an A with no caveats. I'm so happy the shark fin patch is back.

20+ years on this board and I'm still learning stuff on it all the time. Thanks, @ebod39and @Mingjai.

I was specifically thinking about how pretty much every on-field NFL jersey pre-Nike lockdown was made by Ripon Athletic, and the Champion/Wilson/Puma/Reebok/Russell/Starter/LogoAthletic logos sewn on the sleeves were basically the extent of those companies' involvement in the manufacture. Interesting that Adidas' jerseys are being made by S&P. I think they made jerseys for Nike/Bauer back in the 1990s.

What happens here when I tell you that, for decades, many of the "manufacturers" whose logos appeared on the sleeves or hems or wherever didn't actually manufacture those jerseys?

"Unlike in the original Fisherman pieces, the 2022-23 Reverse Retro will not contain the Lighthouse shoulder patches, with no shoulder patches at all." You nitwits got rid of the best part!

This feels like it could unleash the blue/gold-black/white dress discourse all over again if the Sharks don't hurry up and do an unveiling.