Wiseguy
06-06-2004, 02:10 PM
The Issue
World Wrestling Entertainment has a grueling road schedule that prevents the majority of workers time away from their families, and more notably their kids. It comes to a certain degree that the majority of the wrestling families, have no father to look after their child. In many cases, Scott Hall and Mick Foley to be exact, have had to take a lighter schedule in order to see their kids besides a couple days during the week, which in most cases, the wrestlers come back too tired to be able to even entertain their children. It has to be one of the most treacherous road schedules any sports figure has to pay homage to nowadays, and the cost of the expense has become such a minimal amount to what it used to be. It’s such a shame that World Wrestling Entertainment has taken all aspects of competition and flushed it down the drain in order to save their own company, and all it is to them, is footage.
Excessive file footage to market feuds and matches, so it can show a history of what one particular wrestler or one particular feud was sparked from. They used it to it’s key in several DVD’s, but was it really worth all that trouble? The monopoly WWE has made is making their end, much more difficult to maintain, because nothing I’ve seen from them lately, or even in the past year, has been surprisingly good. The only good thing I can think of would be bringing Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit to the main event. So, they have all these aspects of power shown, but all the storylines they have come up with are seemingly recycled, reduced, and reused or incredibly easy to pull off.
They need a complex storyline, no not a love triangle (for the one millionth time), but a complex storyline such as Austin being run over - “Who Dunnit’?” - But actually pull it off in the end. They need something new and enticing, because they are running out of ideas, more quickly then they get them. They are doing fine, by all means, on the Raw side; However, on the Smackdown side, they are struggling tremendously. No longer will I watch Smackdown with utter content until Bradshaw’s reign at the top is completely diminished. He doesn’t deserve to be associated with a main event level, of any kind. In addition to that, Smackdown’s storylines have gone second rate, and the pushing has been horrible. I mean, as I stated with Bradshaw, he shouldn’t be in the main event, and the reason being - He had NO push! It’s the same situation with Jacqueline winning the Cruiserweight Championship last night. It makes little sense to put a heavy push on someone who was at the bottom of the barrel one week, and the next he is either a main eventer or she is a Cruiserweight Champion. Smackdown is losing credibility quick, and the ratings are showing that.
The major source of income with the WWE is house show schedules, but with the dwindling down of House Show attendants, the dying down of Smackdown show attendance, or any WWE attendance for that matter, it becomes a money issue. It is no lie Vince McMahon has yet to break even to what he once had during the Attitude era, and now he is just losing money every year in hopes of gaining more money and revenue in return. It hasn’t really worked as to how he most likely wanted to believe. The Pay Pr View’s have been declining in buy-rates, month by month. It was projected that since WrestleMania XX, the pay per views have been doing embarrassing numbers and this next Smackdown pay per view, headlined with Eddie Guerrero (WWE Champion) vs. John Bradshaw Layfield, it could be one of the worst buy-rates in WWE history, but in a way for the creative team, it’s history making, I guess. So as the money continues to trickle for the WWE, the company slips to produce high-quality television we once received from them. The pay for the wrestlers, may not be paying for the wages, flights, luxuries, and merchandise in-take. They could be losing small chunks of money, rather then receiving more. This is all of course, a projected opinion or an outlook, rather then supported by hard-focusing evidence; However, in that same token, the proof is WWE’s yearly earnings, which has gone down from year to year. Vince McMahon no longer appears in Forbe’s Magazine, because he isn’t a billionaire anymore. He’s lost a gigantic load (in his mind, certainly not to ours) of money, and is only pushing upwards to hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s not a big loss in our minds, but to him, it has to be such a plummeting and devastating blow to an ego, we already know he has. The cost of running World Wrestling Entertainment, is in high-stakes, and right now, it’s not producing.
The big-named superstars are hard to come by with the WWE, you have Triple H, The Undertaker, Ric Flair, Shawn Michaels, and possibly Vince McMahon. In that case, it’s rather sad. All of those men are past their prime, and the time for most of which, is time to hang up their wrestling boots. So how can they really push over new superstars at this time? Eddie Guerrero was sent to the dogs because he was put over by a somewhat established star in Brock Lesnar, and then beat Kurt Angle at WrestleMania XX, but after that, he was not given a main eventer to establish himself better. He, right now, no matter what anyone says, is not solid as a main event wrestler as of yet. He still needs to be put over, and that is why this feud with Bradshaw is doing nobody, any good. The fact is, in order to gain more revenue and more money, WWE need to build up their stars for future pushes, and you can’t build up a star with weak storylines and diminishing main eventers.
Reasoning of why more and more big-named superstars are leaving WWE or the sport itself is due to injury because the schedule of today is such a physical one, and hard strain on your body. It gets to the point that a wrestler becomes injured during years of doing it. Stone Cold Steve Austin, Kurt Angle, Scott Steiner, and even Triple H can testify to that. Now, in most cases they are trying to work their way out of that by putting in more slow-paced moves to settle nagging pains or aches wrestlers currently have, and hopefully stopping future injuries. The flaw with that summarization is that it will not help, because with those extra moves added in, also comes in crowd participation, and when they don’t feel like they are being apart of the show, it spells even more displeasure towards the show. All these situations are at a fault for the current plan, and needs a quick solution that came go out to solve this problem, very instrumentally, I may add.
The Solution
National sports are broken into seasons. The National Basketball Association plays a total of 82 basketball games per season. The season wraps up in mid-June, and opens back up in October, the time between a new season is five months. The WWE wrestlers have been banged up, physically and mentally, from plane to Australia and the next day in California, it’s such a torturous schedule that could be much more lighter, and the solution is rather simple. Give WWE and the fans itself, downtime. We make WWE wrestling a seasonal operation, but it doesn’t need to be of a 5 month stunt. It can be that of summer vacation. As in about a two or three month break of WWE television, in it’s place can be past episodes or UPN can air movies during those time slots, with the summer vacation, people aren’t gonna be watching as much television as they usually do. It may sound crazy, but there’s plenty of benefits from this procedure.
World Wrestling Entertainment has struggled, and let’s be honest, the majority of the issue has to do with decision making and creative ideas with storylines, gimmicks, and feuds. With the downtime, the creative team (who will be at a shorter break, most likely start work again at the beginning of the second month) will have a fresh mind with plenty of time to produce new plans, new ideas, and new feuds to take place in the next season. It is in that place, where the majority of the decisions can be balanced and criticized by one’s self before presenting it. This break creates will give a better understanding for storyline aspects, and just actually make people think, rather then giving their over-worked brains a second look over, and spruce a recycled idea. They would have a chance to be more creative and more time to give their mind a more distinct thought process. It would be best for everyone because the WWE would actually be prepared, rather then booking the shows and all storylines, on the fly.
All money problems can easily be solved in one or two ways, if they wish to rent out their time slot to other programs, they would gain money for having another show in its place, and what show or movie would not want to be in the Thursday, 7:00 time slot? I think many would be fidgeting to get a hold of such a valuable spot. UPN would have to go over all changes, but if they can still produce money, and WWE still making money, it still is good. A two-month break isn’t as bad, they can release merchandise, such as ‘the entire previous season’ or ‘first quarter of the latest season’, and people would most likely buy the product. Plus, the flights, the poor attendance, the down-turn in Pay Per View buy rates, and the fact that WWE has not been gaining money, more then losing it, they can turn it around. They would quit expenses during these off-months, and when the third month starts, that’s when they would start. They’d have to find a way to break even, which isn’t that hard without having to pay the wrestler’s expenses. A contract would only be good to one year, unless otherwise marked for additional years. No expenses would be paid over this break, just like no school is paid over this break. They would most likely give their wrestlers the absolute downside guarantee on their contract to ensure they aren’t completely strapping for cash, and like I stated before, WWE can sell merchandise of all sorts, and compilation pay per views in it’s place.
What happens with the internet if the WWE becomes seasonal? The news sites, and forums would all be lacking of discussion and views because the topics are no longer to be found, there is no hot news, or breaking news to discuss, and any rumors would be strictly confidential until the season opens back up. It’s not a good thing for us as internet fans, but it would be a good thing for World Wrestling Entertainment, considering they despise all internet users who spread their opinion on the inside business. It is a harsh plan to cut the cord of the internet to it’s very core. It can make striving internet sites, making money off of hits, completely dead.
Now, an idea I’ve been playing with is something that could be the greatest asset to this WWE seasonal outlook, and that’s the brand extension. Every year, new rosters are assembled the first two shows on Raw’s telecast and on Smackdown’s telecast. It becomes a tradition for the show and marks new feuds and new storylines. This way every new season has completely different faces for each show, instead of doing a re-brand or occasional roster trades. The current announcers would obviously stay with each brand, as I don’t think they would match up with a different pair and have become the perfect voice for each show. Now, with the roster split and new people on each show, they would set a time limit of about 3 months after the start of the season for a trade deadline, and after that, no more trades could be made to either show. They could also find ways of getting past that, such as saying they did a silent agreement before the trade happened, or a wrestler can get fired or injured and appear on the highest bidder’s show. It just becomes a better aspect all together, because this brings new focus on different stars on different shows, and the creative team has so much time thinking of storylines to reflect this roster split. It wouldn’t be spare of the mind, they would be thinking from instinct, and balancing the brands would be the primary objective.
In addition, fans would not be turned off by so much wrestling, rather then striving more to talk about the new season when it comes up. Something would change in anticipation because it’s not the same season, you won’t be seeing the same thing, things would always be different every year, and unlike sports teams, it wouldn’t be allowed to be stacked up like the Los Angeles Lakers or the New York Yankees, they would try to make them as even as possible and the competition and the entire aspect of the show being watchable, would set in. It would be the fans that suffer the most from this change, but the majority of the time we don’t realize we are getting too much exposure to something to fully enjoy it, and we don’t realize that we constantly criticize rather then appreciate what they do for us, and if anything, they would deserve a time off, which leads me to my next point.
A new schedule change would help the wrestlers that make the company work, get a long awaited time off from the wrestling schedule to play with their children and watch them actually grow up, rather then hearing about it. If a wrestler doesn’t have family, he at least gets to rest his body and a well-deserved vacation for what he sacrificed for our entertainment. I find the schedule would be more useful to them then anyone else. They need to rest their body, the nagging injuries, and body aches to only come back to the wrestling ring more strong and athletic then before. It happens at the end of every year, and at the end of every year, they would be able to re-cooperate from the injuries. The WWE schedule is about as brutal as any other sports team, but the difference is that it’s year-round. They have no breaks, and why shouldn’t they? They definitely deserve it, and I actually think it would be a positive for the company, rather then a negative.
Would it work? That's for you guys to decide. . .
World Wrestling Entertainment has a grueling road schedule that prevents the majority of workers time away from their families, and more notably their kids. It comes to a certain degree that the majority of the wrestling families, have no father to look after their child. In many cases, Scott Hall and Mick Foley to be exact, have had to take a lighter schedule in order to see their kids besides a couple days during the week, which in most cases, the wrestlers come back too tired to be able to even entertain their children. It has to be one of the most treacherous road schedules any sports figure has to pay homage to nowadays, and the cost of the expense has become such a minimal amount to what it used to be. It’s such a shame that World Wrestling Entertainment has taken all aspects of competition and flushed it down the drain in order to save their own company, and all it is to them, is footage.
Excessive file footage to market feuds and matches, so it can show a history of what one particular wrestler or one particular feud was sparked from. They used it to it’s key in several DVD’s, but was it really worth all that trouble? The monopoly WWE has made is making their end, much more difficult to maintain, because nothing I’ve seen from them lately, or even in the past year, has been surprisingly good. The only good thing I can think of would be bringing Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit to the main event. So, they have all these aspects of power shown, but all the storylines they have come up with are seemingly recycled, reduced, and reused or incredibly easy to pull off.
They need a complex storyline, no not a love triangle (for the one millionth time), but a complex storyline such as Austin being run over - “Who Dunnit’?” - But actually pull it off in the end. They need something new and enticing, because they are running out of ideas, more quickly then they get them. They are doing fine, by all means, on the Raw side; However, on the Smackdown side, they are struggling tremendously. No longer will I watch Smackdown with utter content until Bradshaw’s reign at the top is completely diminished. He doesn’t deserve to be associated with a main event level, of any kind. In addition to that, Smackdown’s storylines have gone second rate, and the pushing has been horrible. I mean, as I stated with Bradshaw, he shouldn’t be in the main event, and the reason being - He had NO push! It’s the same situation with Jacqueline winning the Cruiserweight Championship last night. It makes little sense to put a heavy push on someone who was at the bottom of the barrel one week, and the next he is either a main eventer or she is a Cruiserweight Champion. Smackdown is losing credibility quick, and the ratings are showing that.
The major source of income with the WWE is house show schedules, but with the dwindling down of House Show attendants, the dying down of Smackdown show attendance, or any WWE attendance for that matter, it becomes a money issue. It is no lie Vince McMahon has yet to break even to what he once had during the Attitude era, and now he is just losing money every year in hopes of gaining more money and revenue in return. It hasn’t really worked as to how he most likely wanted to believe. The Pay Pr View’s have been declining in buy-rates, month by month. It was projected that since WrestleMania XX, the pay per views have been doing embarrassing numbers and this next Smackdown pay per view, headlined with Eddie Guerrero (WWE Champion) vs. John Bradshaw Layfield, it could be one of the worst buy-rates in WWE history, but in a way for the creative team, it’s history making, I guess. So as the money continues to trickle for the WWE, the company slips to produce high-quality television we once received from them. The pay for the wrestlers, may not be paying for the wages, flights, luxuries, and merchandise in-take. They could be losing small chunks of money, rather then receiving more. This is all of course, a projected opinion or an outlook, rather then supported by hard-focusing evidence; However, in that same token, the proof is WWE’s yearly earnings, which has gone down from year to year. Vince McMahon no longer appears in Forbe’s Magazine, because he isn’t a billionaire anymore. He’s lost a gigantic load (in his mind, certainly not to ours) of money, and is only pushing upwards to hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s not a big loss in our minds, but to him, it has to be such a plummeting and devastating blow to an ego, we already know he has. The cost of running World Wrestling Entertainment, is in high-stakes, and right now, it’s not producing.
The big-named superstars are hard to come by with the WWE, you have Triple H, The Undertaker, Ric Flair, Shawn Michaels, and possibly Vince McMahon. In that case, it’s rather sad. All of those men are past their prime, and the time for most of which, is time to hang up their wrestling boots. So how can they really push over new superstars at this time? Eddie Guerrero was sent to the dogs because he was put over by a somewhat established star in Brock Lesnar, and then beat Kurt Angle at WrestleMania XX, but after that, he was not given a main eventer to establish himself better. He, right now, no matter what anyone says, is not solid as a main event wrestler as of yet. He still needs to be put over, and that is why this feud with Bradshaw is doing nobody, any good. The fact is, in order to gain more revenue and more money, WWE need to build up their stars for future pushes, and you can’t build up a star with weak storylines and diminishing main eventers.
Reasoning of why more and more big-named superstars are leaving WWE or the sport itself is due to injury because the schedule of today is such a physical one, and hard strain on your body. It gets to the point that a wrestler becomes injured during years of doing it. Stone Cold Steve Austin, Kurt Angle, Scott Steiner, and even Triple H can testify to that. Now, in most cases they are trying to work their way out of that by putting in more slow-paced moves to settle nagging pains or aches wrestlers currently have, and hopefully stopping future injuries. The flaw with that summarization is that it will not help, because with those extra moves added in, also comes in crowd participation, and when they don’t feel like they are being apart of the show, it spells even more displeasure towards the show. All these situations are at a fault for the current plan, and needs a quick solution that came go out to solve this problem, very instrumentally, I may add.
The Solution
National sports are broken into seasons. The National Basketball Association plays a total of 82 basketball games per season. The season wraps up in mid-June, and opens back up in October, the time between a new season is five months. The WWE wrestlers have been banged up, physically and mentally, from plane to Australia and the next day in California, it’s such a torturous schedule that could be much more lighter, and the solution is rather simple. Give WWE and the fans itself, downtime. We make WWE wrestling a seasonal operation, but it doesn’t need to be of a 5 month stunt. It can be that of summer vacation. As in about a two or three month break of WWE television, in it’s place can be past episodes or UPN can air movies during those time slots, with the summer vacation, people aren’t gonna be watching as much television as they usually do. It may sound crazy, but there’s plenty of benefits from this procedure.
World Wrestling Entertainment has struggled, and let’s be honest, the majority of the issue has to do with decision making and creative ideas with storylines, gimmicks, and feuds. With the downtime, the creative team (who will be at a shorter break, most likely start work again at the beginning of the second month) will have a fresh mind with plenty of time to produce new plans, new ideas, and new feuds to take place in the next season. It is in that place, where the majority of the decisions can be balanced and criticized by one’s self before presenting it. This break creates will give a better understanding for storyline aspects, and just actually make people think, rather then giving their over-worked brains a second look over, and spruce a recycled idea. They would have a chance to be more creative and more time to give their mind a more distinct thought process. It would be best for everyone because the WWE would actually be prepared, rather then booking the shows and all storylines, on the fly.
All money problems can easily be solved in one or two ways, if they wish to rent out their time slot to other programs, they would gain money for having another show in its place, and what show or movie would not want to be in the Thursday, 7:00 time slot? I think many would be fidgeting to get a hold of such a valuable spot. UPN would have to go over all changes, but if they can still produce money, and WWE still making money, it still is good. A two-month break isn’t as bad, they can release merchandise, such as ‘the entire previous season’ or ‘first quarter of the latest season’, and people would most likely buy the product. Plus, the flights, the poor attendance, the down-turn in Pay Per View buy rates, and the fact that WWE has not been gaining money, more then losing it, they can turn it around. They would quit expenses during these off-months, and when the third month starts, that’s when they would start. They’d have to find a way to break even, which isn’t that hard without having to pay the wrestler’s expenses. A contract would only be good to one year, unless otherwise marked for additional years. No expenses would be paid over this break, just like no school is paid over this break. They would most likely give their wrestlers the absolute downside guarantee on their contract to ensure they aren’t completely strapping for cash, and like I stated before, WWE can sell merchandise of all sorts, and compilation pay per views in it’s place.
What happens with the internet if the WWE becomes seasonal? The news sites, and forums would all be lacking of discussion and views because the topics are no longer to be found, there is no hot news, or breaking news to discuss, and any rumors would be strictly confidential until the season opens back up. It’s not a good thing for us as internet fans, but it would be a good thing for World Wrestling Entertainment, considering they despise all internet users who spread their opinion on the inside business. It is a harsh plan to cut the cord of the internet to it’s very core. It can make striving internet sites, making money off of hits, completely dead.
Now, an idea I’ve been playing with is something that could be the greatest asset to this WWE seasonal outlook, and that’s the brand extension. Every year, new rosters are assembled the first two shows on Raw’s telecast and on Smackdown’s telecast. It becomes a tradition for the show and marks new feuds and new storylines. This way every new season has completely different faces for each show, instead of doing a re-brand or occasional roster trades. The current announcers would obviously stay with each brand, as I don’t think they would match up with a different pair and have become the perfect voice for each show. Now, with the roster split and new people on each show, they would set a time limit of about 3 months after the start of the season for a trade deadline, and after that, no more trades could be made to either show. They could also find ways of getting past that, such as saying they did a silent agreement before the trade happened, or a wrestler can get fired or injured and appear on the highest bidder’s show. It just becomes a better aspect all together, because this brings new focus on different stars on different shows, and the creative team has so much time thinking of storylines to reflect this roster split. It wouldn’t be spare of the mind, they would be thinking from instinct, and balancing the brands would be the primary objective.
In addition, fans would not be turned off by so much wrestling, rather then striving more to talk about the new season when it comes up. Something would change in anticipation because it’s not the same season, you won’t be seeing the same thing, things would always be different every year, and unlike sports teams, it wouldn’t be allowed to be stacked up like the Los Angeles Lakers or the New York Yankees, they would try to make them as even as possible and the competition and the entire aspect of the show being watchable, would set in. It would be the fans that suffer the most from this change, but the majority of the time we don’t realize we are getting too much exposure to something to fully enjoy it, and we don’t realize that we constantly criticize rather then appreciate what they do for us, and if anything, they would deserve a time off, which leads me to my next point.
A new schedule change would help the wrestlers that make the company work, get a long awaited time off from the wrestling schedule to play with their children and watch them actually grow up, rather then hearing about it. If a wrestler doesn’t have family, he at least gets to rest his body and a well-deserved vacation for what he sacrificed for our entertainment. I find the schedule would be more useful to them then anyone else. They need to rest their body, the nagging injuries, and body aches to only come back to the wrestling ring more strong and athletic then before. It happens at the end of every year, and at the end of every year, they would be able to re-cooperate from the injuries. The WWE schedule is about as brutal as any other sports team, but the difference is that it’s year-round. They have no breaks, and why shouldn’t they? They definitely deserve it, and I actually think it would be a positive for the company, rather then a negative.
Would it work? That's for you guys to decide. . .