The XFL's inaugural season will open Feb. 8 with a game between the D.C. Defenders and Seattle Dragons in Washington, according to a full schedule the league released Tuesday morning. The game will be televised on ABC.
The league's eight teams have been divided into two divisions. They will play five home and five away games between Feb. 8 and April 12, followed by one round of two playoff games April 18-19 and a championship game on April 26.
The schedule was devised in part to work around the NFL's winter and spring events. The opening weekend is the weekend after Super Bowl LIV, and the XFL championship game will take place on the Sunday after the NFL's 2020 draft.
"It's a big moment for us,'' XFL commissioner Oliver Luck said. "We've got great time slots on the weekends. We think it's a well-designed schedule in terms of competitive balance.''
The XFL is owned by WWE chairman Vince McMahon, who has committed $500 million to his second attempt at fielding an alternative football league. The first, also known as the XFL, folded after one season in 2001.
This version of the XFL is run by Luck, who has pledged to avoid gimmicks but has said he wants the XFL to be a faster-paced version of the current game.
Every XFL game in 2020 will be televised by either ABC, ESPN, Fox or FS1. The full schedule can be found here.
"If you think about football in this country, I think you'd certainly have to think about ABC and ESPN and Fox with what they do, so I think these are trusted broadcasters, they've broadcast literally hundreds of thousands of NFL games, major college games,'' Luck said. "So their talent that they'll assign will be top-notch talent. So we think there's never been quite honestly a startup league that's had these kinds of windows, this kind of exposure.''
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
