XFL too early?

As the football playoffs are down to the final four, I look at the NFL and wonder
about where today's sports have come.  Over 10 years ago, Vince McMahon came up with
an idea called the "XFL," which kept football pure.  He had a professional football
league in America that still allowed you to hit players.  Trash talking wasn't
penalized and players and teams were paid more for wins.  Even back then, there
seemed to be discontent with how babied the NFL has become.  Defenders are sometimes
penalized for "leading with their head when tackling."  Looking at the NFL players,
I noticed that all of them have their heads located above their shoulders.  To make
a tackle, they bend down and drive their shoulders into an offensive player.  Given
that, given the placement of the head on a human body, in order to drive your
shoulder into someone, you have to lead with your head.  Football is supposed to be
a hard hitting manly sport.  Now since pretty boys like Tom Brady play it, defensive
players are fined constantly for making hard hits on players.  Defensive players
complain about this all the time, especially now.  But, when Vince McMahon offered
them an alternative, the XFL, it was rejected.  Almost nobody watched.

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, a very big football town.  My high school has the
state record for most state championships in football.  Because of this, there were
many football jocks in my high school and they all seemed excited about the XFL
since it would allow them to watch real hard nosed football again.  But, alas, this
didn't happen.  No matter what McMahon did, he couldn't get people interested in the
one year that the XFL was in existence.  It ran during the off-season of the NFL and
it still didn't catch.  Now when I hear NFL linebackers complaining week after week
because Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, fined them for tackling someone
hard, I wonder if maybe the XFL's problem wasn't that people didn't want to watch
hard hitting football but that people hadn't hit a fever peek yet with the kid
gloves of the NFL.  Have we reached the fever pitch now?  Was the XFL tried too
early?  Will a Vince McMahon come out of the wood work and offer an alternative so
people can play real football again?  Are fans really upset to see the
overprotection of kickers and quarterbacks and the main defenders on their favorite
teams continually suspended for a game because of a hit that would have been
perfectly legal not too long ago?  Or have Americans really gotten too soft to
appreciate a violent sport?  In a country where anything that could possibly be
construed as taunting is harshly penalized and victimized, maybe people just aren't
built to handle someone looking them in the eye and saying "you suck."  Maybe they
can't handle a bruise on their skin without running to their mommies or wives crying
like a little girl.  Throughout the years, records will be broken, but I will never
give credence to any of them because if you were allowed to hit the way you could in
the old days, these players probably wouldn't be achieving these numbers.