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Saturday Morning News

XFL May be Newest Guilty Pleasure on TV

Aired February 3, 2001 - 7:23 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: OK, admit it. Many of you out there will scoff at the new XFL, call it trash TV, maybe. But just as you rubberneck at an accident on the highway, you will be tuning in tonight. It is kickoff day for the XFL. It promises to be a high- charged mix of Wrestlemania and football. But will fans tune in?

CNN's Peter Viles with more.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

PETER VILES, CNN FINANCIAL NEWS (voice-over): Start with one of the oddest couples in business, wrestling king Vince McMahon and General Electric chairman Jack Welsh, whose kingdom includes NBC. Accentuate the violence by eliminating rules like the fair catch, put the governor of Minnesota in the announcers' booth...

JESSE VENTURA, ANNOUNCER, XFL: This is game, this XFL, that you young people are going to eat up, because it's going to be like video football live.

VILES: ... and toss in plenty of sex, and you've got the XFL, an A-team (ph) football league that makes its debut in Las Vegas on Saturday.

LINDA MCMAHON, CEO, XFL: We sold over 500,000 tickets, 80,000 of those are season tickets. We were about, oh, somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of our advertising inventory sold, and we haven't even played the first game yet. So we think we're well on our way.

VILES: So what makes this league different from the others that failed in the past? McMahon's track record for tailoring television to young men, and a business model that makes no effort to steal NFL talent. Salaries are capped at roughly $50,000. In the NFL, they average $1.1 million.

Television rights fees -- NBC paid $50 million to own half the league. The NFL charged three networks a total of $18 billion over eight years. Ownership -- the XFL, a joint venture of the WWF and NBC, owns all eight teams. The NFL's 32 teams are separately owned.

So how to judge the new league? TV ratings.

NEAL PILSON, PRESIDENT, PILSON COMMUNICATIONS: I think the real benchmark will be, like, week four. If the week four ratings are well below weeks one, two, and three, and the pattern seems to be declining, then I think the league has a significant problem.

VILES: But is it real football?

MCMAHON: It's 100 percent football on the field. Now, Las Vegas does have a line, there are folks betting on this game.

VILES (on camera): It is true, you can bet on the XFL in Vegas. But there's a catch. If you bet on NFL games, they'll take a bet of up to $100,000. But casinos right now won't take more than $1,000 bet on the XFL. They want to wait awhile and see exactly what it is that Vince McMahon has up his sleeve.

Peter Viles, CNN FINANCIAL NEWS, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com

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