COLUMN: XFL, BattleHawks are bringing fun back to springtime

There’s something romantic about St. Louis football being back.

I was born in late 2002, so I never got to experience the “Greatest Show on Turf.” I didn’t even get into football until 2017, a spell after Stan Kroenke’s departure for greener pastures in Los Angeles.

By that point, I’d dove head-first into Bears football (the 5-11 kind of Bears football, not the 12-4 kind of Bears football the next year).

All this to say that I never got to experience going to the Edwards Jones Dome in downtown St. Louis and seeing the Rams while growing up, though some people I grew up with did. I never got the experience of rooting for a professional football team in my backyard.

That was until 2020, when some of my friends and I (the “Snake Gang,” we called ourselves) made a pact to come together every weekend and watch the St. Louis BattleHawks as they battled for supremacy in the newly-revived XFL, then operated by Vince McMahon of WWE fame.

The BattleHawks were the best team in the league in our eyes. We sat down on the couch in a rotating series of basements, we got loud and, most importantly, we all supported the same cause – seeing a BattleHawks win, whether the XFL meant anything in the grand scheme of things or not.

That’s why, when the XFL shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic just five games into the season, it was like a gut punch for fans like myself.

The next few years get a little bit hazy. Later in 2020, Dwayne Johnson (actor, wrestler, better known as “The Rock”) and a group of investors purchased the league for $15 million.

Since then, it’s remained dormant – until this past Sunday. The same St. Louis BattleHawks, albeit with a vastly different roster, took the field in San Antonio’s Alamodome to face off against the Brahmas.

Those BattleHawks trailed 15-3 before snapping the ball with just 1:31 left in the fourth quarter. They won 18-15, and I danced up and down the halls of my dormitory in celebration.

My roommate kept persisting about how terrible the quality of play was, how “mid” every player was compared to the average NFL player.

The fact of the matter is – I don’t care, and neither do countless other elated football fans across the United States that watched a professional football team from St. Louis escape the clutches of death on ABC’s national television schedule.

The XFL is an entertainment league. There’s no denying that. The elimination of touchbacks, the addition of a three-point conversion after touchdowns and even a new fourth-and-15 alternative to the onside kick that the BattleHawks used to claim a wild come-from-behind victory on Sunday.

But at the end of the day, the XFL is just the thing that football fans such as myself are looking for – a way to sit down on the weekend and watch football, even though the NFL season is long over.

With six months remaining until the high school football season kicks off, there’s only one gridiron team that the state of Missouri supports.