Bruce Prichard Discusses The Chaotic Circumstances Surrounding The End Of The Inaugural XFL in 2001

The revival of the XFL began on Saturday, February 8th, 2020. With two games in the record books for the new league, it has generally been received well by critics thus far, which is a stark contrast from the inaugural XFL back in 2001.

Speaking on his podcast, Bruce Prichard describes the chaotic time surrounding the end of the inaugural league by detailing its close proximity to not only WrestleMania in 2001, but the purchasing of WCW and the sudden moves that came together with that business deal.

“Yeah, I think that Vince is one of those people that the more he has going on in some regards, the better he can be,” Bruce began. “At this time, there was so much shit going on and he was involved in every single bit of it. It was chaotic. I mean, it was just crazy because we’re trying to take care of our shows in the middle of all this shit. You know, you’ve got XFL games going on and by this time I was so far removed from the XFL, if you mentioned the word football to me, I probably would have popped. So I was so far out of it and so far away from it, I didn’t want to know.”

Continuing on, Bruce would describe the relief that he, along with a few other WWE writers, would feel when they finally got screwed the end of the XFL season in 2001.

“We were you know, we were we were in the forefront and WrestleMania was in front of us,” he continued. “And on the wrestling side of things, that’s what we were focusing on, and in the middle of it, we got thrown the monkey wrench with, oh, by the way, we need to go down to Panama City and produce the last Nitro. ‘Oh, shit. Okay.’ And by the way, we’ve got WrestleMania coming up. And in the middle of getting to the biggest show of the year, you have all this other shit going on. The XFL, for us, was [a mindset of] get them through their big game at the end of the year and we’ll see what happens at the end. You’ll let us know. But I don’t know that anybody was that dug in on the XFL from our side, especially like myself, Michael Hayes, and Brian Gewirtz, who had experienced it firsthand. We were like, ‘thank you, God! Get us out.'”

In 2020, the XFL is under the umbrella of Alpha Entertainment, which is a separate entity started by Vince McMahon to house projects outside of the WWE. The opening games would see the Washington D.C. Defenders pick up a win over the Seattle Dragons and the Houston Roughnecks defeat the LA Wildcats.

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