XFL ME, BABY.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS BIZ

If you ask me, sports fan, this whole Amazon HQ2 thing is secondary to a much bigger question about Denver's worthiness as a first-class, modernist, smartly dressed yet calculatedly relaxed metroplex reflecting a demographically desirable blend of craft beer adoration, upwardly mobile citizenry and insatiable appetite for sports.

Which is: Will we get an XFL team?

Because in case you didn't make out all the syllables, that voice-of-boom you heard the other day carrying forth over the fruited plain and beyond was that of the legendary promoter/maven/huckster/fanatic/hell raiser supreme Vince McMahon, he of the professional wrestling organization WWE and the brilliant contrivance of choreographed chaos it has rained down across cable television since he coaxed it to life from a few smoking embers of possibility into a goliath entertainment empire over the last four decades. What you heard from WWE headquarters in Connecticut was the familiar growl of the emcee of the extreme, the never-say-die impresario who's telling anyone who listens that it's 2000 all over again except this time he means it, this time his vision for an alternative to the staid, corporatized, buzz-killing entertainment that is a National Football League game is serious, self-assured and satisfactorily backed by $100 million of his own sweat-and-nerves capital. This time the XFL, the league that for one shining year gave you barely dressed cheerleaders, jerseys bearing unfathomable nicknames, trick plays, Rod Smart and an MVP in the form of Tommy Maddox (yes, Broncos fans, that Tommy Maddox), the league whose three-letter acronym Vince McMahon apparently kept on a low simmer all these years at the U.S. Patent & Trademark office, is back in business.

"We're going to give football back to you, the fans," McMahon promised in January, unveiling the reboot of the XFL for a planned 2020 launch. And then, the money line: "What would you do," asked a game-faced Vince, "if you could re-imagine the game of professional football?"

What would we do? Vince, this one's easy. We in Denver have just suffered through a 20-week journey through football hell, a joyless, lousy, moribund tour of gridiron glumness. It wasn't just that we couldn't beat the Dolphins, Vince. It's that when we did win--which was infrequently--we looked like we'd just spent a Wednesday locked down in Conference Room 417 listening to descriptions of the new benefits plan from Ron, the senior...