“We started off trying to reimagine the game of football,” Schwartzstein said. “But I think what Oliver and I and the rest of us ended up doing was to reengineer it. What we realized is that you don’t want to change too much, and then have fans look at our game and say, ‘That’s not football.'”

The midseason numbers were a mix of modest achievement and mild disappointments. Teams averaged an unexceptional 20.5 points per game, and from a gambling perspective, 12 of 20 games fell under the total. Television ratings dropped from a high of 3.3 million average viewers per game in Week 1, roughly the same average as the 2019 Liberty Bowl, to 1.2 million in Week 5, equivalent to the 2019 First Responder Bowl. Those numbers were slightly ahead of the Alliance of American Football (AAF) in 2019. Average attendance remained flat at 18,600 fans per game. The XFL’s two biggest-market teams, the Los Angeles Wildcats and New York Guardians, actually drew the lowest average attendance figures at 13,124 and 14,875, respectively.

On the other hand, there were legitimate reasons to project optimism for the second half of the season. Of the XFL’s final 16 regular-season games, 12 would have been broadcast on ABC or Fox as opposed to cable — raising the possibility of a ratings rebound. A handful of teams were catching fire in their local markets, most notably St. Louis, where the BattleHawks averaged 28,541 fans per game and had already sold 36,000 tickets for their next home date on March 21 against the Wildcats.

The actual crowd likely would have been larger, Hunzeker said. When the XFL initially suspended its season March 12, the BattleHawks were selling 6,000 tickets per day. Their ticket office was projecting attendance of at least 45,000. By that point, the BattleHawks had taken in $6 million in local revenue, well exceeding their fiscal goal for the entire season ($4.7 million).

Meanwhile, coaches were beginning to grasp the new math imposed by the XFL’s point-after options, veering away from one-point plays from the 2-yard line (37% of the time) in favor of two points from the 5 (47%) and the occasional three-point attempt from the 10.

It had taken some time after the league hired eight head coaches from traditional and conventional football backgrounds, headlined by former Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops in Dallas. Three former NFL head coaches — Jim Zorn in Seattle, Kevin Gilbride in New York and Marc Trestman in Tampa Bay — acknowledged the steep learning curve during the season. Former NFL assistants Winston Moss (Los Angeles), Pep Hamilton (DC) and Jonathan Hayes (St. Louis) were adjusting to their first head-coaching jobs. Only June Jones (Houston), with experience as a head coach in both the USFL and the CFL, seemed unfazed by the transition.

And in what turned out to be the XFL’s final game, the Wildcats and Tampa Bay Vipers produced the kind of event league executives had been dreaming about. The Wildcats won 41-34 in a game that featured a combined 136 offensive plays and, despite being delayed by a serious injury that required an air cast, was completed in 3 hours, 3 minutes — shorter than the average NFL game in 2019.

“I really think that last game of the season showed what the rest of the year would have looked like,” Schwartzstein said. “Because every one of our players were essentially rookies. We were getting better every week, and it was going to get exciting, just like the NFL gets exciting, toward the end of the season. We had really just scratched the surface. We were playing at a level that was equivalent of the highest level of college football. Maybe not LSU against Clemson in the national championship-type level, but still really high-level football with some really cool innovations. I was pleased with it.”

For its debut season, the XFL mostly pursued players who had been released from NFL training camps or rosters within the past year. It signed one player, St. Louis safety Kenny Robinson, who still had college eligibility remaining and was subsequently drafted by the NFL’s Carolina Panthers. The Wildcats’ Josh Johnson and Dallas Renegades’ Landry Jones, both longtime NFL backup quarterbacks, were the most recognizable names in the league. Jones was lured in part by a contract that paid him near $500,000, a bit more than the average No. 3 quarterback in the NFL.

But the best team was the 5-0 Houston Roughnecks, led by June Jones and featuring quarterback P.J. Walker. Once a member of the Indianapolis Colts’ practice squad, Walker received a recommendation from former Colts starter Andrew Luck, Oliver’s son.

“If you stack up Houston against any other team,” Galko said, “in any other league, I think only an NFL team would beat them. That includes the CFL.”

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The Houston Roughnecks rally from an early 14-0 deficit to defeat the Seattle Dragons 32-23, improving to 5-0 on the season.

In fact, given a few years, Mueller said, the XFL could have developed a handful of teams that would be competitive in the NFL.

“There is enough talent out there,” Mueller said, “and the XFL was providing the structure to build a USFL-, ABA-type of league. I would have liked to have had a run at that over the next two or three years. Building from scratch is an easier and quicker way to top-notch competitiveness than taking over an NFL team and being stuck with 70% of your cap and roster.”

Walker parlayed his XFL performance into a backup job with the Panthers. The BattleHawks’ Jordan Ta’amu, meanwhile, signed with the Kansas City Chiefs. Overall, however, the XFL recognized a need to adjust its quarterback-recruitment strategy. Veterans, such as Landry Jones and the Guardians’ Matt McGloin, who were signed in part because of their familiarity with coaches, largely flopped.

In 2021, Galko said, the league planned to pursue younger and higher-profile NFL quarterbacks who had been lost in the shuffle.

“We wanted to go to a Josh Rosen, for example,” Galko said, “and say, ‘Hey, we know you have talent. You got screwed by circumstances in two different spots. You’re going to get cut by the Dolphins. Don’t go be a backup for the Seattle Seahawks. Come show teams how many players you are better than.’

“Quarterbacks need to play or else their value is going to be greatly diminished. Who knows what would have happened, but that was our plan.”

So was it only the pandemic?

Those 2021 plans went into full development after the XFL suspended its season, along with the rest of the sports world. Its office in Stamford, Connecticut, across the street from WWE headquarters, closed two days later on March 15. Employees began working at home.

Oliver Luck, who did not respond to an interview request for this story, retreated to his family home in Indiana. The season was officially canceled March 20. According to a source, McMahon himself approved the language of the announcement, which read in part: “We look forward to playing full seasons for you — and with you — in 2021.”

As they look back on the three weeks that followed, some former staffers have found reason to question whether that claim was genuine. Luck submitted budgets for the 2021 season. He did not receive a response. Team communication staffs were instructed to cancel scheduled interviews designed to reinforce the league’s plan to resume play next year.

Between March 10 and April 10, according to bankruptcy filings, the XFL — through its parent company, Alpha Entertainment — made four substantial payments totaling about $2.05 million to the WWE for shared services, bills that would have made the WWE an unpaid creditor after the April 13 bankruptcy filing.

Parallel to those payments, which were unknown to most XFL employees at the time, 2021 planning continued. Schwartzstein submitted a proposal for the league to play as a single-site entity, much as the NBA has planned for the remainder of its 2020 season, that would shave millions of dollars from the budget and account for the possibility that fans would not be allowed into games for safety reasons.

Despite the national economic unease, many XFL employees remained convinced that McMahon’s financial commitment would protect the league from making a short-term decision. Mueller, a former NFL general manager who also had worked for the bankrupt AAF in 2019, considered himself savvy in the corporate side of game. He never considered the possibility that McMahon would walk away from the $200 million he had already spent.

“We knew the AAF was smoke and mirrors,” Mueller said. “We knew there was issues there. We knew that wasn’t being portrayed upfront the way it actually was behind the scenes. But we thought the XFL was very upfront. You knew Vince McMahon had the money.”

Even so, McMahon was dealing with financial challenges on multiple fronts. In late January — before the pandemic, and a week before the XFL season began — he ousted two longtime WWE executives. The company’s stock immediately dropped 20% on Jan. 30, a consequence that Luck noted with some concern to a handful of XFL employees.

The XFL’s shared services agreement with the WWE also had raised eyebrows within the XFL offices, which were regularly interacting with WWE counterparts. In December 2019, the Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System filed a shareholders lawsuit seeking information about the exact nature of the relationship between WWE and the XFL, and whether McMahon or other senior officers might have diminished the WWE by diverting some of its resources to the XFL. The suit was dropped this spring.

The WWE managed to resume content production amid the pandemic, airing a fanless but well-received WrestleMania 36 on April 4-5. McMahon was already working on plans for a series of WWE layoffs, furloughs and other cost-cutting moves designed to stabilize the company for an extended period of lower revenues. They were announced April 15. And according to Forbes magazine, McMahon’s net worth has dropped by $1 billion, from $2.9 billion to $1.9 billion, in the past year.

McMahon turned his attention to the XFL. At the time, Luck was warning people internally that the NFL and/or college football seasons could be pushed back in a way that would overlap with the XFL’s proposed February 2021 kickoff.

“We had been treating that time as an extended offseason,” Hunzeker said. “What I’m gleaning happened — and I was not part of any conversation, but as someone following along — is when you can’t guarantee when the next season is going to start or be played, that becomes a new variable in the equation that wasn’t there on the 12th of March when the season was first suspended.”

In a court filing, McMahon’s attorneys blamed the coronavirus for the decision to shutter the league. “[W]ere it not for the COVID-19 pandemic,” they wrote, “the XFL would not be available for sale in the first place.”

While that might be true, the state of the WWE can’t be ignored when considering McMahon’s willingness to continue subsidizing the XFL amid the pandemic.

“I consider the end of the XFL as we knew it to be tangentially pandemic,” said an XFL employee who requested anonymity in order to be candid. “It wasn’t necessarily the national economy but our owner’s economy that played into it. The WWE stock dropped, there were some executives that left and you start getting worried a little bit. And then the pandemic hit the WWE stock, as well.”

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Kevin Seifert says former XFL commissioner Oliver Luck has sued owner Vince McMahon for wrongful termination after the league filed for bankruptcy.

David Carter — a leading sports industry analyst, principal of The Sports Business Group and an associate professor of sports business at USC — agreed.

“It would be lazy to dismiss the XFL’s failure just to the pandemic,” Carter said, “because many businesses, you could argue, have used the pandemic to accelerate whatever their eventualities were going to be. It’s pretty easy to hide a failure in a pandemic. I’m not saying that’s what they’re doing. But we’ve seen businesses that have said, ‘But for the pandemic, our share price would have been fine, and we wouldn’t have gone bankrupt.'”

Is there a still future for spring football?

If a league funded by a committed and capable billionaire couldn’t make it, what could? After the successive demises of the AAF and XFL, admittedly for different reasons, industry analysts are split on the future of alternative football leagues.

“We still don’t know that spring football works in this country,” said Andrew Kline, founder of the investment bank Park Lane, which specializes in sports investments. “Football season is so intense, and it’s just associated with the fall season. You wonder if part of the cycle is that people need to come down from it for a while.”

Any future forays, Schwartzstein said, must be guided by clear guardrails.

“I don’t think it’s impossible,” he said. “But you have to be focused on what you want to be, and not be too disparate in what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to serve the average fan? The hyper-passionate fan? Are you trying to serve the local fan? Are you trying to make it a streaming product? Do you even want fans at the games?”

LISTEN: Kevin Seifert on the ESPN Daily Podcast

The most obvious model in terms of market demand is a large-scale developmental league geared toward serving the NFL, something the football ecosystem has lacked since NFL Europe was shuttered in 2007. Dramatic cuts in NFL offseason work for players and coaches, starting with the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, has slashed developmental time for quarterbacks and offensive linemen, especially. NFL Europe, many will recall, helped develop a long list of quarterbacks, including Kurt Warner, Brad Johnson, Jon Kitna and Jake Delhomme.

The XFL explicitly avoided that association, but it’s worth noting that nearly three dozen of its players have signed NFL contracts this spring. Nine of them went to the Pittsburgh Steelers, who noted that they preferred players with recent pro-level experience and tape over the uncertainties of undrafted rookies — especially amid the limitations of the pandemic.

Brian Woods, the CEO of The Spring League, has managed to sustain his alternative league for four years based on a tightly maintained developmental model, offering players an opportunity to draw attention from NFL and CFL scouts in exchange for a $2,000 fee.

“There is ultimately a need for that kind of platform,” Woods said. “The business model of the XFL and the AAF have showed us that their structure is very difficult to sustain. I think the way we do things, where we are in every sense of the word a true developmental league, and we have a structure that has mitigated the higher costs, is the way to self-sustain. I don’t think that the demise of both of those leagues is a mandate that there is no need for spring football. I just think those business models were not realistic.”