• Wrestling News & Wrestling Rumors – WWE & TNA

Editors Note: This column was inspired by one I read on another site, but it got me thinking so I’ll put my own perspective on it.

Back in 2002, WWE caused quite the stir in the professional wrestling world, when it announced that it’s two main shows, WWE Raw and WWE SmackDown would each have separate rosters. The move came after WWE acquired WCW in 2001, and were seriously lacking in terms of creativity. The idea was originally an attempt to create competition within itself, with two General Managers each rivalling to be better than the other.

The original brand extension as it were called was just creating two separate shows, but WWE has since created a third show: ECW, which attempted to bring the once hardcore phenomenon into the WWE fold, and Vince McMahon to put his own spin on ECW. The show has since become a brand where new talents find their niche (or don’t, as the case may be – see Abraham Washington) until being moved onto the two main brands.

However, over recent years, WWE has found a lack of main event talents to fill out their pay-per-view broadcast, which has meant that they feel the need to use their talents in the same feuds over and over again. Today, a shocking statistic was released by one of the dirtsheets which was that in all, the combination of Triple H, John Cena and Randy Orton have been in a main event on the Raw brand 25 times in five years. That is due to their being a lack of main event talent on the brand over the years.

The lack of talent isn’t because there’s no-one there who could have taken over: MVP, Mr Kennedy (now released), Umaga (now released), Shelton Benjamin and others have all at one time or another been branded “the main event” and all of them have spent time (one of them still is) with the Monday night Raw brand. Could this be a lack of confidence on WWE’s part to have these guys in the main event, or could this actually be because WWE hasn’t had the integrity to build these guys up into a main event position well enough that the fans believe it? Probably a bit of both.

Another huge factor that plays into WWE’s problem with a lack of depth to there rosters is the fact that they host too many pay-per-views each year. On average, WWE presents about 14 WWE pay-per-views, when it has become the common that a wrestling company only did 12 pay-per-views a year. It seems that WWE spends more time worrying about quickly building a pay-per-view main event (usually in a three week span) then they do actually BUILDING their superstars up. Sure, Randy Orton, John Cena and Triple H are great. But after a while, wrestling fans are just going to get tired of it. Which will probably lead to a dip in their pay-per-view revenue – something WWE wants to avoid in a recession!

So with the aforementioned trio headlining the Raw brand so many times, the Brand Split has to come into question. Is it that WWE have too many brands and can’t quite split out their talents evenly, or is it back to the idea that they just haven’t built their main eventers up properly? Again, probably both.

There was once a time where WWE assigned different pay-per-views to different brands. Meaning that one month, Raw would present a PPV offering, and the next month SmackDown would take their turn in presenting a PPV. WWE has since ceased using this concept, as it didn’t bring in enough PPV revenue, and they needed to make more money. This, however, came with a price, as it meant that fans were overloaded by three (Raw, SD, ECW) main events, with three different world titles, and the brands hadn’t had enough time to build each main event properly. When, before that, there could be as much as an eight week gap between a brand’s PPV one month, and it’s next one 2 months later. This also meant that some of the less utilized talents, as well as all of one brands championships, were being spotlighted on every PPV. Now, WWE only manages to fit all their titles into a PPV on one night of the year. That’s not good for the title. As well as this, they’ve resorted to having title matches, and switches, on free television – something I disagree with personally.

Sometimes, there’s no need to tweak something that ain’t broken. Personally, I believe that the brand-exclusive PPVs were working for WWE. It was also working for it’s talents, too, as JBL, Rey Mysterio, Batista, and Randy Orton all rose to be World Champions through being exclusive to a brand, and WWE having the time to build their characters properly, to a place where they could trust them to be a World Champion and carry the company. The latest stars to have risen to a World Title were Jack Swagger (ECW) and CM Punk (SmackDown) and those title reigns have floundered, while the characters were strong. However, maybe in the case of Jack Swagger he wasn’t really ready (he was only on the roster 4 months).

Closing Segment:
I don’t think that stopping the brand split is the right way to go, but I do believe that brand exclusive PPVs were the platform to creating new World Champions, which we have seen at least on four occasions in the past since the brand split began.