The XFL, a professional football league, is having a tentative start to their second-ever season. The acronym stands for ‘X-Treme Football League’. Despite low TV ratings and underwhelming response, the small league owned by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and ex-wife Dany Garcia shows promise for its upcoming future.

Conor Orr of Sports Illustrated summarized the XFL as “on-the-rails, appropriately-quirky spring football,” which accurately describes the small league that consists of only eight teams. The XFL’s minimal teams all have surprising and interesting names. In the North Division, there are the DC Defenders, the Seattle Sea Dragons, the St. Louis BattleHawks, and the Vegas Vipers. In the South Division, the Arlington Renegades, the Houston Roughnecks, the Orlando Guardians, and the San Antonio Brahmas. 

To kick off their 2023 season, they began with a game between the Vegas Vipers and the Arlington Renegades in mid-February. TV ratings declined in comparison to the league’s debut in 2020 with only 1.54 million people watching the first game of this year as compared to the 3.3 million viewers for the first game last season.

The main feature of the XFL is that it’s played during the spring season, much like the USFL, the United States Football League, which also only has eight teams. 

Multiple players of the XFL have become infamous in their own right. Quarterback of the Orlando Guardians, Paxton Lynch, has been officially pronounced as only quarterback in history to be benched in the NFL, USFL, and now XFL.

Along with that, recently Dov Kleiman, an NFL reporter, announced on Twitter that “the Guardians of the XFL cut QB Quinten Dormady after he allegedly gave an opposing team plays from the Guardians playbook. The team heard about it, investigated, and released Dormady.”

Hopefully, the XFL will be able to pick up their ratings and finish out this season with more to come in the future.