The X-tinct Football League

Members of the XFL pro-football league have been sent to the showers and the league’s owners will take a bath following Thursday’s announcement that the league is folding after a single, disastrous season. The owners, NBC and the World Wrestling Federation, will take an estimated $70 million loss. “The audience came, and they didn’t like it in the numbers we needed to go forward,” Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports, said during a telephone press conference Thursday. “The fault lies with us.” The fate of the league was reportedly sealed when UPN said that it wanted more money to carry XFL games next season than the league was willing to pay. Vince McMahon, head of the WWF, commented, “We hoped everyone would look at this as we did, as a brand- building business. … We tried to figure out every conceivable way to make this work, but we came to the cold, hard decision that this was not going to work.”