'Tremendous amount of success': XFL co-owners reflect on season, talk about what's next

The first season of the third iteration of the XFL is almost in the books.

Nearly three years after purchasing the spring league out of bankruptcy for $15 million, Dany Garcia and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will travel to San Antonio, Texas, to watch the rebooted XFL’s championship game between the D.C. Defenders and Arlington Renegades on Saturday night. The game kicks off at 8 p.m. ET and will be televised on ABC.

Given the chaotic history of spring football leagues, simply completing the 2023 season is something of an accomplishment. But Johnson, the former college football player turned actor, and Garcia, his ex-wife and longtime business partner, said they view Year 1 as just the first step in a long process.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day. This league isn’t going to be built in a day,” Johnson said Thursday evening. “It’s day-by-day, year over year.”

Ahead of Saturday’s game, USA TODAY Sports caught up with Garcia and Johnson, the XFL’s co-owners, to evaluate the 2023 season and look ahead to 2024.

‘A tremendous amount of success’

The XFL saw a slight uptick in attendance in the second half of the regular season, and a slight downturn in television viewership. Overall, the league averaged roughly 13,000 fans and 561,000 television viewers per regular-season game, according to game-by-game figures compiled by the website XFL News Hub.

When asked if the XFL had met or exceeded its quantitative expectations in those two categories, attendance and TV viewership, Garcia said “we had a pretty complicated matrix” for evaluating success. She instead pointed to positive metrics in other key areas, such as average margin of victory, pace of play and digital impressions.

“Knowing that we have a lot of work to do, I just see a tremendous amount of success,” said Garcia, who is the league’s chairwoman. “And it was an intricate measuring system. We had a lot of marks to hit. So I would say overall, I give us a very high grade.”

Johnson said some of their goals for the league are difficult to measure. He believed Year 1 was about establishing a high quality of play on the field, for example, and a healthy culture for players and the league.

“I felt like we showed a lot of promise in a lot of areas,” he said, “and we’ve got a lot of great work ahead of us.”

Roster turnover

Johnson has repeatedly described the XFL as a passion project, a league that he hopes will serve as a springboard for players like he once was, on the fringes of the NFL. That’s why he and Garcia have been thrilled to see so many XFL players receive tryout opportunities with NFL teams -- 54 players, in total, as of Thursday.

The drawback, of course, is that this figures to lead to significant roster turnover -- and a potential depletion of talent, as top players like league MVP A.J. McCarron look to move on.

Garcia, however, said XFL leaders have been preparing -- and even hoping -- for such turnover. She and Johnson believe there is no shortage of talented football players outside the NFL and expressed confidence in their league’s scouting and evaluation mechanisms, which will help find them.

“We celebrated this potential because it means that we become an even more attractive property year after year,” Garcia said. “What we have to do is have systems in place that don’t just rely on a player to get great play but rely on the team to play dynamically. So what are the rules, what is the training, what is the facility, what is the care that they’re getting first, where are all the edges we can invest (in) so that the product the fans see every year is consistent and gets better.”

Changes in 2024

Garcia indicated that the XFL does not have plans to relocate any of its eight teams to new markets in 2024.

“We made a commitment to our cities and we’re excited to be there,” she said.

In fact, Garcia said, one of her hopes for 2024 is to strengthen the connections between teams and their host cities during the offseason, though it’s immediately unclear what those efforts will entail.

Separately, Garcia also said the league also plans to “double down” on the care and experience it provides for athletes, which could prove pivotal as the XFL continues to jockey with the Canadian Football League and spring competitor USFL to woo top non-NFL talent.

“Hopefully creating an improved, evolved player experience -- so they feel, again, the passion of the ownership here,” Johnson added. “We’re in it for the long haul.”

Potential expansion?

Garcia said many of the plans for 2024 will be hashed out at an off-site retreat for league leadership, where they will look more closely at the data from 2023 and evaluate next steps.

And one of those steps will be to examine other cities and markets that could be ripe for future expansion.

“Now that may not be exactly 2024, but expanding and bringing in new markets is going to be very important,” Garcia said.

Though expansion might not be on the immediate horizon, even the preliminary discussion of it is somewhat notable, given the string of recent spring football league failures that preceded the most recent versions of the XFL and USFL.

Johnson said with a smile that he’s been stumping for the XFL to put a team in his native Hawaii.

When asked how many teams he would eventually and ideally like to have in the league, he demurred.

“I can’t put a number on that. Because when you think about it, we’ve just got to continue to do the diligence and put in the work and look at these markets,” Johnson said. “I think every market has shown promise, and I think we just continue to work and see how it all shakes out. I’m tempted to give a number, but I think it’s too early.”

Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: XFL's Dwayne Johnson, Dany Garcia: On 2023, changes, expansion