All I said was it gives players an option to earn money. I didn't say it was a better prep for the NFL.
But you said this:
...of course they've always going to lose their top draws to the NFL once they hit the 3 years out of high school NFL draft limit.
That is wrong. There is zero chance that an NFL team would take someone on who had never played collegiate football. It just will not happen. The talent gap and physicality gap is too much.
I was only complementing them on attacking a sport that can be beaten, college football.
College football cannot be beaten with respect to being the funnel for NFL players. The sports that survive are the ones that make the money, period. College football has the most dedicated fan base in sports with traditions going back well over a century. There are 69 P5 teams that provide almost all NFL players. The facilities, coaching salaries, TV viewership ad revenue, ticket and marketing sales are in the tens of billions of dollars. Nothing, not the XFL nor any other league, is ever going to replace that when it comes to football. The sport will die out because of head injuries and waning participation numbers long before anything else comes along to dethrone the NCAA as a feeder.
If the NFL wasn't so powerful and didn't choose to work in partnership with college football, it would already be under siege from the NFL for the last decade+
The NFL works closely with college football because it has to. There are zero high school seniors on this planet who are ready or able to play in the NFL. None. So that leaves someplace where they have to go while their bodies finish growing, while they strength and agility train, and learn how to play football at the NFL level.
You have suggested that an accessory league where players could get paid would be an attractive alternative for these high school kids to play until they are old enough. But what you're ignoring is the development they get while at a P5 school. Look, in the NFL almost every starting receiver or running back is what would be considered a world class sprinter. And they have to be able to catch and run with a ball, and be big and strong enough to absorb repeated hits from 250 lb NFL linebackers. Offensive and Defensive lineman have to be some of the largest and strongest humans on the planet. Quarterbacks have to have split second decision-making, accuracy, and arm strength. You could go on and on about any position...ALL players have to have ridiculous amounts of football knowledge and experience, the ability to quickly learn entire playbooks inside and out, and even the absolute best college players say all the time how the most difficult thing to adapt to in the NFL is the speed of the game and how difficult it is to transition. No one in the modern era of football has ever come out of high school ready for that.
How do those players get to that point then? They spend 3-4 years in P5 football programs. With world class coaches in world class facilities micromanaging every part of their lives from every structured workout, practice, and team meeting down to the last calorie of their diets. College football go to that point over a 100+ year period from the billions and billions of dollars coming in from all directions and the rabid fanbases that aren't willing to give their fandom up. You think some other league is going to somehow lure the Chris Doyles and Dabo Swinneys away somehow when they already make probably 10 times what their counterparts would each year and fans worship the ground they walk on? Do XFL teams even have strength training staffs? Serious question. Bottom line is it's not going to happen.
Keep in mind, everything you just said about college football could have been said about college basketball 25 years ago. But the NBA doesn't give a shit about college basketball and the sport is nowhere near where it used to be. Now you have high school players skipping college even though they can't get drafted for another year.
Again, professional basketball is a sport that's playable by certain people coming out of high school. It's been done over and over. Professional baseball's best players never went to college. Those two sports don't require that you're an almost super human athlete to even have a chance of playing, and they're about 1% as complex as football.
Football is not a sport where that's possible. It takes 3-4 years of growth, and 3-4 years of the best coaching and strength training in the world to do it. The barriers of entry are too high for anything else to come along.
