Sheamus turned heel after being off TV for a couple months. It wasnt like he showed up on RAW and turned heel the Monday after a PPV where he fought a heel. And it isnt even close that he makes a much better heel than face. As for Barrett, well if he is the 4th or 5th top heel in the company, who are they going to have him fight with? He already kind of has a title being King, so having him fight for the IC or US title is a bit redundant, so he is going to go up against mid carders. Hopefully they will blow off this feud with R Truth and then have him move into something better with someone like Cesaro now that he isnt in the tag division anymore.

"Being off TV for a couple months" is not a reason for someone to turn heel. I mean, let's compare:

1) someone you were friends with is making crazy eyes with your girlfriend and you snapped
2) you've been getting passed over for title shots for 6 months by face commissioner
3) was off TV for a couple months

One of these is not like the other

For starters (and this isn't Captain Hindsight talking, I and many others were thinking this when it was announced), don't do ****ing KOTR. It was a terrible idea thrown together with like 36 hours notice right in the middle of WWE's PPV extravaganza, where they were having a PPV every two weeks.

Secondly, the idea to give Barrett the "King" title was stupid. He was getting over with great performances as BNB, and now he's gone nowhere with this king gimmick while losing well over 50% of his matches.

What should Barrett be doing? Probably going after the IC title. (Yes, I know he's held it 5 times already, but whatever.) He lost it in a multi-man ladder match at WM. He got a chance at it at EC, but he was the first entrant. IIRC, he was eliminated even before the eventual winner came out. (My memory might be hazy because that's my current favorite for worst MOTY).

Why doesn't Barrett want his title back? There's just no logic there.

The dip in ratings is clearly a result of having too many vanilla midgets on the roster. Indie promotions have a low glass ceiling for that very reason. Give the people what they want: More big men.

On another note, I would hazard a guess that the biggest demographic tuning out at the moment is older fans. Most of their 'guys' have retired or semi-retired in the last few years. The current product is like an episode of Late Night Poker with a bunch of internet kids. Who wants to watch that? Put Hellmuth, Negreanu, Ivey, Doyle, Laak or Sammy Farha on and people will tune in.

WWE should give vets a run every now and then, have them work with younger guys, and get older fans invested again. Imagine if Steiner showed up on Raw this week, people would tune in just to see what was going to happen.

If Scott Steiner suddenly appeared during a segment on Raw then I would probably watch the whole segment and then think to myself, "Hope that was just a one-time thing."

But the "watch the whole segment" part would be an upgrade for that one segment I suppose.

wwe either doesn't trust anyone on their current roster to carry the ball as the face of the show (holy **** did they fail on their one true attempt in forever on roman) or they just don't have anyone talented enough to do it. i'm leaning towards the latter

just a steep steep steep decline in main event caliber faces over the years, and considering how much of a megastar the rock has become, how transcendent hogan was in his prime, and SCSA being the defiant-****-the-establishment outlet of the 90s teens in the same way dusty rhodes was the everyman in the 70s it stands to reason they just caught lightning in a bottle in being able to have the right people at the right time rather than the product itself being able to generate interest

See, he's on to something. Now all they have to do is bring back a different old guy for every segment and you'll watch them all!

Wasn't that TNA's whole plan?

Most of the main event wrestling stars prior to 10 or so years ago lived their gimmick. Flair, Dusty, Austin, but also DDP, Nash, Hall, Bret Hart, Harley Race HBK, etc. Wrestlers aren't just not encouraged to live their gimmick anymore, in most cases they wouldn't be allowed to. They aren't allowed to party like that. They aren't allowed to get in fights. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it may be a predictable trade off of finding the type of guys that stay inside and play video games and take it easy, and encouraging all of the guys to do so. Larger than life people are more likely to be able to believably portray larger than life characters. Violent tough bad asses are more likely to be able to believably play violent tough bad asses.

Ironically, the one guy that lives his character more than anyone (Cena) actually gets hate for the character, so, idk.

(Bryan did too, sort of, but who knows if he'll be around.)

And Cena is the biggest draw of anybody they have outside of Lesnar, who also lived his gimmick by being UFC champion. Really those are the only two draws in US wrestling right now at all.

Part of that was that the best stars of past eras all were wrestlers whose characters were exaggerated versions of their actual personalities.

These days wrestlers are assigned dialogue sheets and gimmicks with no regard to what their strong suits are. For example, it's no secret roman reigns is a smug *******. So why not have him be that?

There's a reason the road warriors worked and the ascension failed and it's not just that one is a copy of the other. Hawk and Animal had a legit vibe of being tough as nails.

I mean ****, the road warriors were a blatant ripoff of a movie and yet became one of the most popular tag teams of all time. The point is, though, it wasn't the gimmick that did it, it was the people playing it.

These days they rely solely on the gimmick and micromanage that aspect and never let the wrestler underneath show what they can do.

If Steve Austin was 25 years old and breaking into the WWE right now I have no doubt they wouldn't realize a tenth of his potential.

Some of the wrestlers are encouraged to try and invent their own persona; I've heard several times on shoot interviews that Vince or HHH had told some wrestler "Come up with some character ideas and then bring them to me." It still might be a constant struggle against creative if a good idea for a talent created character was allowed. Not that it necessarily wasn't before; top backstage people have said Austin only got as big as he did because he was refusing bad storylines, bad dialogue, and bad feuds on a near weekly basis.

I've heard Nash lamenting the fact that modern wrestlers ride around in tour buses and spend all their spare time staring at smart phone screens, playing video games etc. In his day 'the boys' would carpool and ride from town to town, socialising, drinking together and always talking about wrestling. The latter is a better platform to develop the requisite people skills and street smarts to actually be an interesting, compelling personality.

You could probably listen to guys like Austin, Flair and Nash telling stories of life on the road all day long. Whereas I reckon you'd probably fall asleep after 20 minutes or Orton, Shelton or Seamus.

I think more and more that we're just not the target audience and that's why it seems so bad. To me pushing Reigns and Ryback seems dumb, but when I was at Elimination Chamber they got two of the biggest pops of the night.

Shame that wrestling is at its physical best, but the storytelling is at the absolute worst for the most part.

When did the WWE peak? It's always been pretty bad with a few redeeming qualities that keep us watching.

I agree that the current talent pool has a lot to do with finding it hard to care. We are starting to see the effects of an almost completely WWE bred roster. In the 80's, 90's and 2000's most of the roster was old school, from the territories or trained by someone from one of the two. Now we're getting guys that have only had a WWE upbringing.

A lot of caring about a wrestler is knowing they have history and since hardly any of the guys on the roster don't have a non WWE history or have their history completely ignored, we don't care. JR said it about five times during the WK9 PPV.

This is probably it but given their ratings they're also failing badly with whoever it is they are targeting

Did people who were in their 30s or so during the Attitude Era feel this way, thinking the product has passed them by?

Is there anyone on this forum in their late 40s or 50s that could shed some light on this?

1995

My favorite part about 1995:

I also heard JR suggest a couple times that the WWE should buy old video from ROH of their current stars, which is what I think he was alluding to on the WK9 PPV. And to be fair, it appears NXT started this with their Finn Balor video package. I still think doing one of those on RAW every couple weeks would help a ton on different levels

I would have booked a Droese/Mantaur final, but thats me

Modern wrestling...

we have this popular couple of Lana and rusev. What should we do with them?


I know! Split them up and have Lana pair up with a guy that isn't even fully invested in being with the company, and who has no chemistry with her!

It seems that for most of the company's history the company has made more of an effort to appeal to people who don't like the wacky stuff and people who are a bit more intelligent though. For example, 80s WWF during the Golden Era did have a lot of bull ****, but the heel announcers usually buried it, and were directed to bury it by Vince. Jim Ross called the matches as opposed to recapping the bad storylines for the 5th time. We had somebody on our side. And for every garbage personality (or musclehead without one), there was a good one to balance it out during good years.