Alrighty, many of us have probably heard this by now, but the WWE is holding a draft on October 11th and 14th just a few months after their Superstar Shakeup was closer to a homemade shake and bake recipe, minus the loving touch.
In fairness, they tried to fix it with the Wild Card Rule, which was scrapped after a couple of weeks. Superstars have since been flowing between the two shows freely, giving some of us hope that the storylines of general managers and drafts were behind us and they were finally re-embracing one promotion again.
And then came Fox
With Smackdown moving to Fox in October, it’s only logical that Fox would want their show to have a set roster, especially the better talent. They’ll most likely get half of what they want, but it depends on the draft. Smackdown starts it off on Friday, the 11th, and it’ll b concluded on Raw the following Monday, the 14th.
It’ll give Smackdown a chance to hold onto their audience from their first week on the network and build something new and independent from Raw.
Sounds exciting, right? Well, maybe if it hadn’t been done a million times already. The first time was awesome as it hadn’t been done before, at least not televised. It was exciting and fresh, mixing up the talent and creating opening for the double-sized roster the WWE had after absorbing ECW and WCW.
While that’s the current hope for this draft, it’s been the hope for the previous incarnations with mixed results.
One good thing that will come out of this is Eric Bischoff and Paul Heyman should be able to select their preferred roster rather than settle for what they’re handed. They’ve already shown the naysayers that they know what they’re doing after returning Raw and Smackdown from laughing stocks to respectability.
It’ll also give them a chance to weed out those that aren’t buying into their vision. Don’t want to take the occasional chair? See ya. Think your character shouldn’t lose? See ya. And so on.
McMahon needs to stop puppeteering
This all, of course, depends on how hands off Vince McMahon will be. Triple H has already confirmed that Vince will be hands off of NXT when it comes to USA, so maybe Vince’ll take more of a backseat in the overall operation since he has two former rivals once again working opposite each other? With a plethora of talent to choose from and free reign, it’d be no surprise to see Smackdown and Raw make the most of this and continue to rise if given the chance.
