Eric Bischoff gave his thoughts on various topics on the latest episode of his Strictly Business Podcast. Here are the highlights:
On WWE using main roster stars in NXT:
“I’m surprised we haven’t seen it before this. I’m glad we’re seeing it. I’m surprised we haven’t, and I think people have to remember, NXT is a developmental organization. It isn’t their biggest, brightest stars. WWE’s biggest, brightest stars as it is with AEW. You see their top talent on that show regularly. NXT is a developmental company, and, I wouldn’t expect it to get the kind of ratings with people trying to become stars it will get when it has established stars on the show right now. Dominik Mysterio is probably not the hottest talent in WWE on the roster. He’s still relatively young and new to the industry and building. He’s probably in the bottom of the first inning regarding his career. But he’s pretty hot. And now you bring Ray in as part of, to, to, to support that story, to augment the reality or the storyline. It’s not reality, but the storyline that’s going on inside of the on-domain roster and domain shows. Brilliant idea. I’m surprised we haven’t seen it sooner, but I’m glad we’re seeing it, and I think you’re going to, if we continue to see it, I can see, and I predicted it last year, early this year. I think I told Conrad [Thompson] that at some point, an NXT will outperform Dynamite, and they’re within about a hundred thousand viewers or less of doing that. I predicted it would happen this summer. I’m going to stick with that. Let’s get to work, guys. Come on.”
The rest of the SummerSlam card is more compelling than the main event:
“Perhaps they’re looking at the execution of the turn and going, ‘You know, we could have done that better. We could have done that differently for you.’ To your point early on in this, this podcast, can you go back and think of anything that you could have done differently? I’m sure they’re going back and analyzing. Even while it was happening, you know, there’s a lot of very, very, very experienced, talented, creative people back there watching in Gorilla. I would not be surprised if, back in Gorilla, they were watching along with everybody else, going, oh, that was flat. No big deal. An error in the bottom of the third, or at the end of the first act as the case may be. Great, there’s another inning coming up. Let’s get the team together. Let’s focus, and let’s move on. I look at it like a bump in the road. I don’t even know if it was a bump. You know, they ran over an empty cam. I made a little noise. All right, let’s move on. So I’m still very, very optimistic. But I was let down. I thought that that match to me was the least interesting and compelling thing on the entire card. Everything else on that card was better than the main event.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article, please credit Strictly Business with an h/t to Wrestling Headlines for the transcription.