Oliver Luck will toe the XFL line as its new commissioner. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)
The recently rebooted XFL made what was seen as a pretty big stride toward respectability Tuesday, announcing that Oliver Luck would become the league’s first commissioner and CEO. Luck, father of Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck and a former signal-caller himself, most recently was a high-ranking NCAA executive charged with overseeing that group’s regulatory functions. He also has been athletic director at West Virginia (his alma mater), president of NFL Europe and an executive with Major League Soccer’s Houston Dynamo.
Luck has considerable sports-executive experience, in other words, and his hiring shows that XFL founder Vince McMahon is taking things a little more seriously this time around. The pro-wrestling overlord’s first attempt at an alternative to the NFL, in 2001, was marked by slapdash preparation and terrible football, dooming it to a lone year of existence.
In announcing the new XFL earlier this year — the league is scheduled to launch in January 2020 — McMahon promised shorter, faster-paced games than the NFL. He also said players with “any sort of criminal record” would be prohibited from joining the league and that players would be required to stand for the national anthem.
Luck reiterated that last part on Tuesday.
“We respect individual freedoms,” Luck told Bleacher Report’s Mike Freeman. “But we will require players to stand for the national anthem.”
[Fox News apologizes for implying Eagles players were kneeling in protest. They were praying.]
Taking their lead from former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, NFL players have been protesting social-justice issues by taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem for the past two seasons. Last month, the league’s owners instituted a new anthem policy: Players no longer are required to be on the field during the playing of the national anthem, though they may be punished by their teams and the league if they protest publicly during the song.
According to a report in the New York Times, the owners changed the league’s anthem policy because they were worried that continued attacks from President Trump, who has criticized the protesting players, would damage the league’s reputation. It didn’t work: Trump has continued to use the players as a talking point, suggesting in a television interview last month that they maybe “shouldn’t be in the country.” On Monday night, he canceled the Philadelphia Eagles’ planned visit to the White House to celebrate their Super Bowl title, with the White House listing the Eagles’ protesting players as the reason. But The Post’s Josh Dawsey and Wesley Lowery reported that Trump was unhappy that only 10 to 12 people from the team planned on attending and canceled the event to avoid the bad optics such a small crowd would create.
[NFL owners tried to make Trump happy. Instead, they signed up for more bullying.]
McMahon, with Luck running the football side of things, will now try to capitalize on the NFL’s increasingly battered image, at least in part by appealing to the portion of the pro-football fan base that thinks players should stand during the national anthem. It’s a decidedly political statement that McMahon is trying to frame in nonpolitical window dressing.
“I have no idea whether or not President Trump will support this,” McMahon said in announcing the league’s reformation in January. “As far as our league is concerned, it will have nothing to do with politics, absolutely nothing, and nothing to do with social issues, either. We’re there to play football. We want really good football, and I think that’s what fans want as well.”
Read more from The Post:
Torrey Smith: ‘So many lies’ in Trump’s statement on Eagles’ nixed White House visit
Former Houston Texans cheerleaders detail mistreatment by the team
Dwight Clark, former 49ers WR known for ‘The Catch,’ dies after battle with ALS
Hall of Fame QB Jim Kelly, in third bout with cancer, to receive ESPY Award
It’s all happening. The Capitals are one win away from the Stanley Cup.
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