Jim Cornette gave his thoughts on various topics, including the war between WWE NXT and AEW, during his Jim Cornette Experience.
Cornette spoke about the belief that Vince McMahon wanted to change NXT into NXT 2.0 with a completely different product after the brand lot to AEW Dynamite during the Wednesday Night War.
“Vince didn’t dismantle NXT because they didn’t beat AEW in the ratings. That was just to give them some aggravation and just keep a few 100,000 people from watching AEW. Vince dismantled NXT because he went down there and saw a bunch of f*cking Johnny Garganos and said, ‘What the f*ck has my son-in-law been doing?’ Because I knew they had plenty of sh*t going on there.
That was good, for a while NXT was the best programme we liked for wrestling that wouldn’t insult anybody’s intelligence, didn’t make everything look f*cking fake, and at least had some guys that could f*cking go blah, blah, blah. Vince dismantled it because he went down there and fixated on the amount of people that would never, ever be on the main roster under him, and he was right about most of them. And that’s why he did what he did.
It wasn’t about the TV ratings, Dave [Meltzer] might tell you that because that’s what he hears from Tony Khan, and he’s far up Tony’s a** he wants to believe it too. But the real story was Vince went down there, and then turned around and said, ‘Bruce [Prichard], what do you think?’ And Bruce read Vince’s mind, but they were like, he didn’t see Damien Priest, he saw Johnny Gargano. He didn’t see f*cking, you know, this talent or that talent. He saw the fact that The Undisputed ERA was all f*cking 180 pounds.”
Cornette continued by noting that McMahon might have been more lenient if he thought the NXT roster could thrive on the main roster:
“And that’s what I said, if they had had a couple of guys at that size that were really exceptional, and everybody else looked halfway like a wrestler and that they could make the main roster, Vince wouldn’t [have] had a f*cking issue. But when he sees a bunch of them running around, that’s when he doesn’t want to hear no more, and he’s got his own f*cking idea, and he’s going to revamp that thing, and that’s what happened.
And now even if they revamp it back now, you know, Jesus Christ, you built a pyramid, everybody loved it, then somebody came round and tore it down and you saw well, ‘I guess it wasn’t as sturdy as we thought it was’.”
Cornette linked the situation with Ohio Valley Wrestling’s 2002 graduation class, which saw the likes of Brock Lesnar and John Cena.
“If you held a gun to Vince McMahon in the fall of 2000 and said, ‘Does Brock Lesnar, Shelton Benjamin, and John Cena work for you? He said, ‘Who the f*ck are you talking about?’ He may have recognised Brock’s name, [but the] rest of them? F*ck, I don’t know that he ever watched an episode of OVW in five f*cking years, six years.
So the answer to that question is no, he didn’t know what the f*ck was going on down there and didn’t know what anybody looked like, except what he was told by the people he might ask a question to or might be tasked to give a report. And what were they going to say? ‘Oh, yeah, there’s this bunch of guys down here Triple H has signed up. They’re 5-foot-2 and 100 nothing.’ So there you go. So yes, I agree with Triple H’s comment. Congratulations, you beat developmental.”
Quotes via Inside The Ropes
