Posted in: Doctor's Orders
Doctor's Orders: Big Picture Problems for WWE; Logical Solutions
By The Doc
Dec 14, 2017 - 12:36:39 PM



”The Doc” Chad Matthews has been a featured writer for LOP since 2004. Initially offering detailed recaps and reviews for WWE's top programs, he transitioned to writing columns in 2010. In addition to his discussion-provoking current event pieces, he has written many acclaimed series about WrestleMania, as well as a popular short story chronicle. The Doc has also penned a book, The WrestleMania Era: The Book of Sports Entertainment, published in 2013. It has been called “the best wrestling book I have ever read” and holds a worldwide 5-star rating on Amazon, where it peaked at #3 on the wrestling charts.



QUESTION OF THE DAY: What do you feel is the most troublesome big-picture issue plaguing WWE's product in 2017?

As far back as the build to Summerslam, focus of the year-end variety could have been placed on some of the big-picture issues that have reared their heads in WWE throughout 2017, and the final third of the calendar has done nothing but magnify them. In a social media poll last weekend asking enthusiasts to choose an overall thumbs up, in the middle, or down for WWE this year, the majority of responders selected thumbs down, but the great thing about professional wrestling is that it is constantly moving and big picture problems can find solutions rather swiftly. Today, the big picture issues that played prominent roles in shaping such a negative opinion of WWE by the diehard fanbase in 2017 go under the microscope, with logical suggestions as to how Vince McMahon and company might rectify those problems in 2018.

Problem #1: WWE – Then is Now…Forever

The going thought-process is that big name wrestlers from the past have replaced celebrities as that which set certain WWE shows apart from the rest; where once there was Mr. T, Donald Trump, or Floyd Mayweather, now there is The Rock, Sting, or Goldberg. Unfortunately, WWE caught the disease of more earlier this decade and the ensuing proliferation of nostalgia as the go-to selling point for major events has gotten really out of hand, peaking with WrestleMania 33. All eight of the matches involving male superstars at the Orlando-hosted Show of Shows featured at least one wrestler who became a WWE headlining act in 2005 or prior, and six of them were part-time wrestlers.

Rather than build peak-level personalities for the fresh, current generation using their ridiculous amount of programming hours per week, WWE has instead chosen to marry itself to a formula that leans heavily on recycling old material with talents far beyond their primes, which in part means that the product evolves at a slower pace and that there is now a ceiling on how high a current generation star can climb. The week-in, week-out roster is generally regarded to be as stacked as it has been since the WCW-WWF merger, but the deployment of the talent is inconsistent and lacks the traditional, well-crafted peaks that built the foundations for both the top-tier draws and the high-end secondary players of yesteryear.

Solution: Frankly, WWE is run like one might expect a company run by a 70+ year old man who never takes a break to be. Every report on Vince McMahon seems to detail that he is competent, but impatient and, though he is still a promotional genius, there are limitations that come with age and chronic over-stimulation and those limitations will continue to plague WWE as an on-screen product so long as the buck essentially starts and stops with him. Nevertheless, as much as he might want to keep finding the next Sting, Goldberg, or Kurt Angle to bring back, the nostalgic formula is a water-well refilled by a stream nearly run dry. Sting and Undertaker retired; Goldberg has other priorities; Angle is wrestling on borrowed time. Either the current generation will force its way into solo spots without legendary help at major PPVs en route to establishing its own legend, the older generations simply will not get it done anymore, or a combination of both factors occur but, no matter the methodology, change will eventually come because the current formula simply cannot be sustained forever.

Problem #2: Big Show-Itis / Creative Inconsistency

WWE is an interesting place right now. The Network has been a massive, era-defining success for the corporation, but this decade has seen the trend emerge of WWE never fully committing to its fresh roster of headliners like it committed to them in the past and the result is a product built more around WWE as a brand and less so around the individual stars that its brand features. Rewind the clock ten years and Edge, Cena, Batista, Orton, and even Mysterio had emerged through the mid-2000s as top flight stars that could be counted on to carry the company as aging veterans from the 1990s began or continued their career declines; and that group was booked strongly and consistently enough to be viewed as a stable group of go-to guys, the first four especially amassing numerous career peaks during that period that felt like logical creative crescendos and whose resumes, in hindsight, reflect as Top 20 of the WrestleMania Era by any rational measure of success.

Today, there are a lot of Mysterios, so to speak, who get their big moment in arguably inorganic fashion, then drop down the card considerably, and later work their way back up almost haphazardly while the aging veterans from the 2000s (and still the 1990s as well) get clearly positioned as the superior stars. In 2007, you could predict that Edge would probably main-event a WrestleMania and be a Top 5 player on a few consecutive others; in 2017, you can no more readily assume that Kevin Owens will main-event WrestleMania someday than predict that he will be a perennial spot-duty player on the grandest stage, even though from a generational hierarchy point of view, he is in a comparable position to Edge, who was on the marquee in five out of six years. Top stars should not be treated as fads that quickly go out of style; if they are good enough to get to the top, they should be good enough to stay at or near the top and, when they do, highly anticipated feuds and matches are the by-product.

Solution: Creative consistency may be challenging to establish since McMahon is an old man who does old man things; though his mind is willing but arguably nowhere near as able as it once was, he still gets big-picture ideas. WWE Network was a big picture move, yanking WWE out of the PPV era. We all keep wondering what will trigger him to see creative consistency as a big-picture decision to which he needs to commit.

There are recent examples of the benefits of creative consistency, so all that the product really needs is for McMahon to fully recognize and embrace them. AJ Styles, abrupt and somewhat awkward heel and face turns in less than two years aside, has been steadily pushed from the moment he walked in the door; and so it was not just an independently-built reputation that made people want to see him wrestle Brock Lesnar last month, for instance, but it was the fact that WWE had committed to Styles as a top-tier mainstay, never wavering in its presentation of his status.

Seth Rollins, from mid-2014 until he blew out his knee eighteen months later, was perhaps the most consistently-pushed new star of the decade aside from CM Punk; he turned on The Shield, instantly became the top upper-mid-card heel, won Money in the Bank, made the successful transition to secondary headliner, and then took on the full load of carrying the show as the #1 star. That period made it much harder for him to fail in the future because it gave everyone – fans, peers, and management alike – the chance to see his full value, as opposed to someone like Owens, who WWE has only ever half-heartedly committed to as a top guy.

Follow the Styles and Rollins blueprints (though not to a “T”) and the product will thrive.

Problem #3: The NXT Call-Up Conundrum

Super Chrisss did a good job earlier in the week detailing the call-ups from NXT who were better off on the main roster than they were during their time in the so-termed developmental territory, most of whom did not generate a ton of buzz before getting promoted. Unfortunately, the list of wrestlers who were regarded as more likely main roster stars being criminally mishandled upon their promotion to Raw or Smackdown is getting longer by the year.

Notable blunders in 2015 included WWE wasting four months trying to make Charlotte a babyface before altering course to reimplement the character she played on NXT TV; Tyler Breeze was a sure-fire mid-card dynamo who seemed poised to end up on a list like Super C dropped, but his relevance lasted all of a month thanks to the uncreative team and only through sheer force of will did he stumble upon an act that put him back in the spotlight. 2016 will go down, in part, as the year that WWE completely ruined a female character that some thought could be the fairer sex version of John Cena by totally mismanaging the details that originally made her a star.

2015 and 2016, though, saw its NXT-to-WWE shortcomings off-set by the likes of Kevin Owens, Finn Balor, and (to a lesser extent) Sami Zayn. 2017 has Samoa Joe to champion the WWE cause, but surely his success does not off-set the ridiculously poor handling of Shinsuke Nakamura and Bobby Roode, who were at the very least on equal footing with Owens and Balor as can’t-miss prospects with extremely bright main roster futures. What the hell happened? The King of Strong Style and The Glorious One have essentially been reduced to cool entrances featuring catchy theme music, fractions of the personas that were cultivated in NXT.

Solution: WWE has a choice to make and it revolves around what they want NXT to be. If they want it to be an incredible resource for grooming main roster talent, then let it be that, organically presenting the most obvious solution to the NXT-to-WWE problem in that it simply then takes what works on NXT and brings the complete package to the red or blue brands to either sink or swim in a bigger ocean. In these high profile cases, it seems as though Vince McMahon is completely out of sync with what goes on at NXT and/or feels the need to make call-ups after every Big 4 PPV; and obligatory emotion is rather useless in the absence of an actual plan. Hey, bring Roode up because Summerslam is over. OK, and the plan is? Figure it out later! Well, later has come and gone and every ounce of momentum that arguably the best product to come out of NXT had is up in smoke.

Rumor has it that the try-out of NXT on USA Network will start a chain of events that will further cement the yellow brand on a less than but closer to equal to plane of existence as its Monday and Tuesday night counterparts, which will ultimately heighten the need to figure out how the transitions for NXT top stars will play out, but patience and planning are the clear answers to the questions raised by the issue at hand.