We are hours away from the XFL kickoff this weekend, and sports news stations have started to rank the teams before the action starts.
Tuesday afternoon, Cody Benjamin at CBS Sports released his power rankings for the XFL season, with a confident claim that the DC Defenders are the best team in the new league. Benjamin even made a significant personal wager.
“If the Defenders aren’t vying for the championship in April, I promise you I’ll only eat two boxes of Girl Scout Thin Mints instead of three during that month,” Benjamin promised.
A quick perusal of preseason prognostications reveals that Benjamin is one of very few people to appoint the Defenders as the number one team. Most other websites place the Defenders in either the two or three spot, with the Dallas Renegades decidedly atop the league.
Considering the lack of experience and information going into a new league’s season, it’s hard to know if anyone can really know who will succeed. All that we have until we get a few games under our belts, are semi-educated guesses based on the talent of individual players.
We still have yet to see the most important factors in a team’s success: the chemistry between players and coaches.
Every year in the NFL we see the Pro Bowl teams assemble coaches and players to make an all-conference team. With the best of the best all in one place, you would think that we would get a great battle of the titans, but what usually happens is a turnover ridden, dysfunctional mess of a game.
In the XFL, teams have had far more time to work out plays, formations, and depth charts than the Pro Bowl, but until kick off on Saturday, we won’t know how effective those moves were.
It is exciting to see such consistent admiration of the DC Defenders roster going into week one. Washington D.C. has been starved of good football since Robert Griffin III’s 2012 rookie season.
Thankfully we are only left to speculate for four more days until Defenders take on the Seattle Dragons on Saturday afternoon.
Check out the brand new XFL app and shop tickets through the links below:
XFL APP DC Defenders tickets
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