In January 2001, a month before the XFL season began, a blimp sporting giant logos for both the XFL and a sponsor began flying over Oakland, California. Unfortunately, the zeppelin’s trip around the city ended in the only thing you could expect from something associated with the XFL: utter failure.

According to ESPN, the pilot lost control of his blimp and couldn’t steer it back to the airport. So instead, he and his student pilot abandoned ship by literally jumping out of it. (The student was fine, and the pilot got away with minor injuries.) When a grounds crew failed to tie the blimp down, it simply floated away, moving aimlessly for 20 minutes before crashing into a sailboat mast. It then careened into a power line and a nearby Oyster House restaurant.

Luckily, nobody else was hurt, and the sailboat and restaurant sustained little damage. The blimp, meanwhile, suffered roughly $2.5 million in damage. As for why the accident happened, a spokesman for the company that owned the blimp explained, “There could have been a number of reasons. An airship moves with great mass and it’s very difficult to control it.” Or, it could’ve simply been Vince McMahon’s influence turning it to you-know-what.

The XFL suffered bad ratings it simply couldn’t recover from, but that in itself isn’t news. Plenty of shows have bad ratings. But the XFL’s ratings crisis was so severe, the league actually set a new record for futility.

Thanks to the endless hype and genuine curiosity from the fans, the XFL actually started off strong, with a 9.5 rating in its first week, according to the Chicago Tribune. By contrast, NFL ratings at the time were typically between 10 and 11 for major network games (according to Variety) so the XFL wasn’t trailing far behind. But as ABC News reported, ratings immediately slid, reaching a 4.6 in Week 2 and a 3.1 in Week 3. It was all downhill from there, as fans quickly realized the XFL was, in the words of Eisner Communications senior vice president Abe Novic, “plain old boring.”

By Week 7, ratings had dipped to record lows — not just for the XFL, but for TV in general. As the Chicago Tribune reported, NBC’s Saturday night XFL game posted a pitiful 1.6 rating, which at the time was the lowest rating ever for a prime-time show on the four major networks. Two weeks later, according to the Washington Post, the XFL broke its own record, posting a 1.5 rating for going up against the NCAA Final Four, and for being the XFL.

NFL players get paid millions of dollars, and in exchange they give fans the highest quality football possible. (Yes, even if it’s the Cleveland Browns.) The XFL, meanwhile, paid its players next to nothing, and got next-to-amateur-level football as a result.

As Arizona Republic recalled, since all the teams were league-owned, every XFL player got roughly the same amount of money. Nobody, however, got a lot of it. Quarterbacks were paid the most, earning $50,000 a year. Kickers were paid the least, at $35,000, while most other positions earned $45,000. As for bonuses, each team received $100,000 per win, divided evenly to its 38-man roster (about $2,600 each). When the Los Angeles Xtreme won the XFL Championship, it earned a $1 million bonus which, according to Fox Sports, was split among 45 players, practice squad included.

Even accounting for every possible penny a player could earn, nobody could’ve possibly roped in more than $100,000 a year at the XFL. Most earned far less — the kicker for the two-win Birmingham Thunderbolts, for example, likely earned about $40,000. Meanwhile, in the NFL, even the rawest of rookies made a minimum of $212,000 at the time, per the Houston Chronicle. As competitive as these XFL players might have been, there’s only so much quality a league can expect when paying players less than they could’ve made by going home and selling insurance.

The Sixth Day was a largely forgettable Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi film from 2000, about a guy who was cloned without his knowledge as part of a massive conspiracy involving clones taking over the world. It’s a pretty ridiculous film, especially the part where it takes place in 2015 and the XFL is still a thing.

Yes, the XFL is featured in The Sixth Day, and not as just another sport — as the sport. (How did this happen? Probably money.) In this world, the XFL is incredibly popular, with a sold-out stadium full of screaming fans. This is the exact opposite of reality, when teams were lucky to play in a three-quarters-empty stadium. Sixth Day XFL is also incredibly profitable — one star player, “Johnny Phoenix,” has recently signed a lifetime contract worth $300 million. Also, he plays for the Roadrunners, which is not an original XFL team. Who knows how many teams this wishful-thinking alternate-universe XFL expanded to?

In addition, we see all sorts of amazing XFL technology, such as Phoenix using his helmet to scan the defense, receive play calls, and apparently get warnings about what play the opposition’s running (if the giant “BLITZ” streaming in front of his face in the above video is any indication). As far as silly 2015 sports predictions go, The Sixth Day beats Back To The Future II by a mile. Future only missed the Chicago Cubs’ World Series win by one year, after all.

Even though it only lasted a year and is largely remembered as a joke, several parts of the XFL moved on to become integral parts of the NFL experience.

As The Comeback explained, the XFL showcased concepts like the SkyCam (an elevated, moving camera that gives an overhead view of the field), players introducing themselves before the game, locker room access, and players being mic’d up on the field. The league might not have invented any of these features, but it was among the first to use them extensively, popularizing them to an extent that the NFL had to take notice. And so, years later, we’ve got an NFL with SkyCams galore, cameras in the locker room, players mic’d up on the regular (though rarely live because many players have potty mouths), and most every game starting with the players giving you their name and school. Beyond the occasional experiment, none of these things were regular parts of the NFL before the XFL. If that’s not proof that inspiration can come from anywhere, nothing is.