The relaunch of the XFL is still a year away, but its eight teams now have head coaches.
The XFL announced today that its eight head coaches will be Wade Phillips, Bob Stoops, Terrell Buckley, Hines Ward, Rod Woodson, Reggie Barlow, Anthony Becht and Jim Haslett.
Stoops was also a head coach for the previous iteration of the XFL, which had an aborted season in 2020. Stoops was a highly successful coach at Oklahoma who could easily find another college head-coaching job if he wanted one, but he seems more interested in the more leisurely pace that comes with coaching in a spring league.
The other seven head coaches are an eclectic mix, with Phillips a coaching lifer who has admitted frustration with his inability to get an NFL job in recent years, while Woodson is a Hall of Fame player who has only a short assistant-coaching resume and hasn’t coached at all since 2017.
The XFL season will launch in 2023. With the USFL set to re-launch on Saturday night, the XFL timed its announcement in a way that keeps its name in the news as many question whether there will be enough interest to support one spring league, let alone two.