The world of professional wrestling was turned upside-down on Thursday as three of the most brilliant minds came back together. Vince McMahon has put Paul Heyman in charge of Monday Night Raw and Eric Bischoff in charge of SmackDown Live, which will shake things up greatly. Even though Bischoff’s new position was just announced, he has long had plans on how to handle WWE’s brand extension.
As reported by The Inquisitr , Heyman was offered the position of executive director months ago. Bischoff only came into the picture in the last few weeks — he likely officially got the position within the last couple of days.
The interesting thing about this announcement from WWE is the timing, as Bischoff was a recent guest of Inside The Ropes and had some big things to say. Speaking to a sold-out crowd, he discussed WWE’s current brand extension and even had ideas as to how he could make it work better.
Bischoff spoke of doing a brand extension in WCW and how it was a failure when he tried to give the nWo their own show and WCW its own. He was a part of the second brand extension, which was WWE’s first, but he was an on-air talent at the time and not someone who had a lot of input on how it would go.
While he wasn’t in WWE at the time the third (current) one started, he is now going to be a big player in how things proceed.
During his talk on Inside The Ropes , Bischoff went on to say how he would change things and work on today’s brand extension in WWE. One of the biggest problems he had with the way things are now is that the product is becoming “diluted” because the brands aren’t entirely separate.
He believes that either Raw or SmackDown should be “gritty” and the other shouldn’t be that way so fans can expect different things.
“That’s the magic and if they both start feeling very well produced, almost glossy in their presentation, and the talent is jumping back and forth, I won’t give it six months. You won’t hear the term brand extension six months from now. It’ll suffer the same fate that it suffered the last time they tried it because that’s what happened the last time they tried it.”
When Bischoff spoke less than a week ago about the brand extension needing to have Raw and SmackDown completely separate, WWE seemed to echo that sentiment. The official announcement from WWE said that this move will push the company as a global brand “while providing two distinct creative processes for its flagship shows.”
Things may end up becoming quite different for WWE in the very near future and as one famous announcer always says, “business is about to pick up.”
