Few people are watching NBC on Saturday night anyway.
Improvement is an extremely modest goal.
Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Sports, is showing little concern about the prospect of starting up a new league with new players, coaches and team names. By contrast, he said the XFL looks like only a minor gamble. But money may not be the only thing at risk for NBC, a unit of General Electric. The most significant unknown about the XFL is not how many people will watch, but how many will people will wince. The XFL start comes at a time when NBC is selling itself to advertisers as the network that reaches the most educated and most affluent viewers.