I know almost nothing about football other than the basics, but I know about Vince McMahon. Does anybody think this will succeed?
IIRC, a lot of this sounds similar to the original XFL. Going for 1-3 points after a touchdown was in the original XFL, shorter play clocks too. The league owned all the teams back then too (something I think is a negative).
Player salaries have barely increased from 20 years ago. Back in 2001 XFL, QB's made $5,500 per week, kickers made $3,500, all others made $4,500. So that was an average salary of $45,000 in 2001, up to only $55,000 now? The major problem last time was talent. Is the talent going to be there now if the inflation adjusted pay has gotten worse?
Also I've heard/read that Vince wanted/promised real (but more in your face) football the first time around, but got more gimmicky and dug into the pro wrestling carny bag of tricks as the season went on and the league was clearly struggling. Will this same stuff happen the second time around if the league struggles again? This is also why I think the league needs individual team owners, because Vince is notoriously stubborn, and really only knows wrestling (and many think has been completely out of touch even with wrestling the last 20 years), need other strong voices that he can't just bully.
The big miss here I think though is the XFL seems to be following the same format hurting all other sports league (including his sports entertainment league) and will slowly die out: broadcast/cable TV and commercials. If you want an upstart league to succeed, find a way to stream it and cut out the majority of commercials (think about how quickly Olympic basketball games fly by without TV timeouts and all those commercial break and timeouts that actually last only a minute). WWE already has success with their own streaming network: they should be looking to expand that and add football (and other sports), or reach an agreement with Netflix or Hulu or YouTube, etc. That's the future. Broadcasting games on ESPN and FOX is not.