Report: Vince McMahon Considered Purchasing the Vikings in 1998, Would’ve Been a Better Owner than Red McCombs
Thanks to Comicbook.com and the ‘Something to Wrestle With’ Podcast, we learned yesterday from former wrestler whose name was Brother Love (among other things) that the Vikings were almost purchased by the WWE’s Vince McMahon in 1998, which was the same year that Red McCombs ended up buying the franchise and obviously one of the most iconic years in the fifty-plus-history of this storied franchise. Now, McMahon is known as the man who took the WWE (formerly the WWF) from a regional wrestling league to the pinnacle of “sports-entertainment” as well as the guy who created a football league by himself in the failed (and supposedly soon-to-be-back) XFL (because if football needs anything in the day and age of CTE it’s less safety!). So, let’s talk about what that may have meant for the Vikings franchise and why either way we should be extremely thankful that the Wilf’s own the Vikings now.
In hearing this, I’m sure that a lot of people’s reactions were similar to mine, that the Vikings dodged a bullet when McMahon didn’t buy the team, as I assumed that the headline was referring to the purchase of the Vikings by the Wilf Family (and the other investors who bought in with them) and that because the Wilf’s are arguably the best owners of any team in Minnesota history (who have spared no expense in putting the best product on the field as possible while also investing a ton in the team off the field as well (or around the field, as is the case in Eagan with the Twin Cities Orthopedic Performance Center)) it obviously would’ve been a disaster had anyone bought the team instead of the investment group that the Wilf’s were the frontmen for, especially someone who has zero loyalty to the state of Minnesota and wouldn’t bat an eye at moving the team to a larger market like Los Angeles.
People bemoan the fact that the public are still paying for US Bank Stadium but the reality is that the football owners have (or at least had) a lot of leverage when it came to putting their own money into a stadium and while you’d think that a league with nearly $10 billion in annual revenues could pool money together to fix-up or replace their crappier stadiums (as the owners all pool their money and the better the facility, the more money they all make (not to mention that they could then own the entire stadium and thus make additional revenue during the non-football months) businessmen don’t make billions by not taking advantage of their positions of leverage and the Wilf’s did put a lot of their own money into the stadium and into Twin Cities Orthopedic Performance Center, especially after the stadium started having issues with panels falling off and the like.
Outside of that, though, there’s really nothing that these owners haven’t done when it comes to at least attempting to put the best product on the field we’ve perhaps ever seen. The Vikings of McCombs’ era were easily the most offensively talented of any Vikings team before or after them and really any offense from any team before or after, however their defenses, especially the further they got away from the pre-McCombs regime, were often terrible and there was little investment put into them as McCombs thought the defense was “championship caliber” (or at least that’s what he said right before he was busted for using signing bonuses to just barely cover the minimum yearly salary cap, something he and the team were fined for, but he knew that they clearly weren’t very good. He also had the powers that be “accidentally” go over their time during the draft in which the team landed Kevin Williams as they didn’t want to pay for his slot in the first round and after not being able to trade down they were the first team in the history of the NFL Draft to go over their alotted three minutes.
If the argument is that they knew they’d get Williams anyway because they knew that the Ravens would draft lineman/linebacker Terrell Suggs there’s still no excuse for doing it that way. That moment exemplified the McCombs era as it seemed like he was willing to use incompetence for an excuse for being super cheap, that’s the worst possible combination of factors that any owner could ever have and it sickens me to know that he made a fortune when he sold the team to the Wilf’s (although their investment has also given them returns nearing the 10x multiplier, should they ever need to take out a home equity loan on the team).
I consider the fact that states (or counties or cities, depending on the location) “have” to pay for stadiums once a generation to be a necessary evil that comes with the territory when you live in a major market. Considering how invisible Minnesota is on the national stage, especially when compared to even Wisconsin, which seems to get a lot more mentions in pop-culture and somehow turn out more famous people, we’re extremely lucky to have all four major men’s sports to cheer for, as that’s not something that states with five-million people (or cities with just over 400,000 and under 300,000 in Minneapolis and St. Paul), typically have. We’ve already dealt with losing franchises in the past from the Minneapolis Lakers moving to Los Angeles and the North Stars moving to Dallas in the early 90’s (not too many years after they made it to the Stanley Cup Finals).
Not long after that, there were talks around Major League Baseball that the Twins were going to be “contracted” because of the lack of a good stadium and the league’s other issues. Even if the Twins left around a decade after winning their second World Series in four seasons it wouldn’t have crushed the people on the level that losing the Vikings would have. The Vikings are by and far the most popular team in the state and they mean so much to people here in terms of our collective identity that I’m not sure the state would’ve ever recovered from losing them. I know I wouldn’t have.
The question becomes whether or not the Vikings would’ve ended up staying in Minnesota at all had McMahon purchased them. Now, Red McCombs was rumored to be looking to move the Vikings to Los Angeles or to his native Texas (in San Antonio) almost immediately after the used car salesman purchased the team and while he often blamed the state of the Metrodome on that, it made sense that a used car salesman would want to move from a top 15-media market in the Twin Cities to the number two market in the country (and one of the top markets in the world) in Los Angeles.
Sure, it hasn’t worked out that great for either the Rams or Chargers thus far in terms of the turnout to games and those teams have local fanbases already, but had the Vikings moved to Los Angeles let’s say around the turn of the Millenium, there’s no doubt that they would’ve been a GIGANTIC draw as they would’ve had Randy Moss, Cris Carter, Robert Smith, Jake Reed and Dante Culpepper and because they already had a pretty large fan base in Southern California (my Uncle used to be a part of the SoCal Vikings fan-club and the Vikings typically poll in the top five-to-ten when it comes to teams with a national following). They also would’ve followed other teams like the Dallas Stars and Los Angeles Lakers in winning a shit ton of championships in their new city as well. That would’ve been our luck.
But back to McMahon. This all came from the above-mentioned podcast where Brother Love stated the following:
“We didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. More than anything it was a publicity stunt because they were floating out there that the Vikings were up for sale and Vince floated it out there that he was interested in it. I dare say that if the price would have been right he might have bought the damn thing for publicity purposes to make it — okay the WWF just bought the Minnesota Vikings and Vince McMahon is now entering the football arena. So it worked, it got people talking.”
The problem with the above is that if it was meant to be a publicity stunt then why are we only hearing about this as fans (or in general) almost 20-years later? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I really believe I would’ve remembered hearing that McMahon was interested in the team and I also don’t think that this would’ve made the news like it did last night had it been something that was already common knowledge (but let us know in the comments or on social media if it was reported back then but just forgot, which again would go against whatever publicity McMahon, who is a master marketer, was looking for). Either way, if you really want to know what sort of owner McMahon would’ve been you can really only look at the XFL.
The problem with the XFL wasn’t so much the action, in and of itself, but rather how the action was marketed and the let-down that came from the follow through. If you’re old enough to remember the days of the XFL it was basically marketed as a much more dangerous and thus exciting version of the NFL. The best example of this was that the guys who were unlucky enough to be returning punts in the league were not allowed to call for a fair catch, with the assumption being that they’d have to stand tough and take a huge hit (or three) in order to return punts for their squad. Like many rule changes it had unforeseen consequences in that most guys stopped fielding punts and would instead just let the ball bounce wherever because as we’ve learned more and more (and the NFL to it’s credit is attempting to fix), punt and kick returns are extremely dangerous.
Outside of that, there wasn’t a lot else to write home about in regards to the XFL. There was the player named “He Hate Me”, which reminds me that players could wear their nicknames on their jerseys. Neat. The XFL only lasted one season and showed that Vince couldn’t market everything and that he was out of his depth (although to be fair it is incredibly hard to launch a copycat league and becomes more difficult with each passing year, however the fact that the XFL only lasted one season with the amount of hype and money invested should be looked at as a major failure). The fact that he is bringing the XFL back in 2020 is puzzling, perhaps he believes that with the rift that exists between the political right and the players that there’s an opportunity to nab some market share or perhaps because he thinks the NFL has gotten too soft with all of its concussion concerns. If that’s true then I guarantee that we’ll hear sooner rather than later that all players are not only required to stand for the national anthem but to also openly weep.
The NFL has attempted to create a few developmental leagues in it’s history with the most recent being the Euro NFL, which also fizzled (meanwhile the Canadian Football league (and Arena Football, maybe?) continue unabated) and perhaps there’s just not enough room in the world for the amazing product that is the NFL and the sub-par equivalent that was the XFL and while the XFL attempted to alleviate the concern that comes from subpar players (at least when compared the product that is the NFL) by adding the element of danger and excitement (just as Arena Football attempted to do the same by cutting the field in half and creating a ton more scoring or the CFL did by replacing the high level of play of the NFL with the passive-aggressive nature of each Canadian, with each QB typically yelling “PLEASE!” after their final “Hut!”.
Luckily as Vikings fans we didn’t end up learning what the combination of those two would’ve looked like, even though as I said I do believe McMahon would’ve been a much better owner than McCombs. However, since there is no indication (or way of knowing, really) that he would’ve sold them to the Wilfs or even kept the Vikings in Minnesota the same way that McCombs did, clearly we’re in the position to say that the ends justify the means even if those means include the worst owner in Minnesota professional sports history. Sometimes you have to go through a period of frustration and/or darkness to get to the promised land and although the Vikings aren’t there yet, they’re at least giving the fan-base a lot of hope even after they broke our hearts the last time we saw them on the field against the Philadelphia Eagles. So, thank you Wilf family for cleansing our post-game pallets by putting money into signing Kirk Cousins to the largest contract in league history and thank you Vince McMahon for not buying the team in 1998 and finally thanks to Red McCombs for the deal I got on that ’98 Geo Prism.
Sidenote: I do remember that Minnesota Arena Football team from years back and I dare say that they had one of the better names and logos of any-team, especially a new team for a new sport. While they very well could’ve ended up like the Swarm, the Lacrosse team that used to play in the XCel Energy Center (and like five other cities as there were multiple teams named the Swarm just as there are a ton of professional soccer teams named “[Location] United” and “Kick”) or even that other team that plays in the Xcel, The Wild (that isn’t a name!). They were called the Minnesota Fighting Pike and they had this amazing logo and also this guy that was at every game (at least the three or four I went to with my dad at Target Center) and was always blacked out drunk and REALLY into the game. A constant stream of drunken “woo-hoos!” that somehow came off even sadder than it sounds. Just check out this logo and tell me that this isn’t a better name/logo than the Wild and it’s ManBearPig.
