Wed, Feb 1, 2017
A bold challenge, a fearless experiment and ultimately, a spectacular failure. In 2001, sports entertainment titans Ebersol and McMahon launched the XFL. It was hardly the first time a league had tried to compete with the NFL, but the brash audacity of the bid, combined with the personalities and charisma of Ebersol and McMahon and the marketing behemoths of their respective companies - NBC and WWE - captured headlines and a sense of undeniable anticipation about what was to come. Bringing together a cast of characters ranging from the boardrooms of General Electric to the practice fields of Las Vegas, "This Was the XFL" is the tale of - yes - all that went wrong, but also, how the XFL ended up influencing the way professional team sports are broadcast today. And at the center of it all - a decades long friendship between one of the most significant television executives in media history and the one-of-a-kind WWE impresario. This film will explore how Ebersol and McMahon brought the XFL to life, and why they had to let it go.
Wed, Jul 12, 2017
Mike Francesa and Chris Russo's 'Mike and the Mad Dog' radio show ruled afternoon sports talk from the New York studios of WFAN 660 for 19 years-not bad considering they didn't think they'd last 19 days together. Even though they both brought Long Island accents and encyclopedic sports knowledge to the microphone, they were distinctly different personalities who often clashed on and off the air. But when all was said and done, they changed sports radio forever.
Wed, Aug 23, 2017
In the fall of 1988 a Texas high school fielded the football team that many consider the greatest ever, yet chances are good you have never heard their story. What Carter Lost is not about the team immortalized in Friday Night Lights - it's about the team that beat them. It's about the year Dallas Carter dominated Texas high school football, never losing a game, but walked away with little more than an asterisk in the state's history books. It's about the legal battles that accompanied every Carter playoff game, the string of inexplicable crimes that forever altered six players' futures, and the community that rallied to support its team, only to find itself tarred with scandal. In the tradition of the best 30 for 30 documentary features, What Carter Lost is a story about the intersection of forces bigger than any game - except for football in Texas.
Mon, Sep 11, 2017
Two weeks into the 1987 season, the NFL's players went on strike. For the first time in the history of professional sports in the United States, replacement players would take the field. Crossing the picket line to play in the NFL changed their lives, but not in the way they'd expected or hoped. The moment they crossed the picket line, they were no longer athletes; they were scabs. By the end of the strike, Washington stood alone as the only replacement team to go undefeated- ultimately setting up returning strikers for a triumphant run at a Super Bowl. For those replacements, the experience of 1987 should have been a badge of honor. Instead, it became a scab that never healed.