Eric Bischoff has commented on the difficulties that plagued his time working as Executive Director of SmackDown for WWE in 2019.
Bischoff returned to WWE after several years of absence to take up the corporate role at the company ahead of the blue brand’s debut on Fox. The former WCW President was not long for the role and in October after SmackDown on Fox had first aired he was relieved of his duties and left WWE once again.
Speaking on his 83 Weeks podcast, Bischoff detailed some of the difficulties and challenges he faced in the role:
“There was so much going on at that time. Remember, this was when Fox was getting ready to premiere, the Fox deal had been consummate months and months before I got there and everybody was preparing. When I got there in July, they had been preparing for months before I got there and that was another part of it, me catching up to that process. The biggest challenge for me was that we knew, everybody knew, we were going to split the roster.”
“At some point, at the draft, we were going to have to publicly reveal what the roster was going to be for each specific brand. That was hard because there was a lot of indecision back and forth every week. Every week there would be a meeting, every week we would have a discussion, and every week we would leave that meeting with a pretty good idea of where we were at, and then the following week it would all change again.”
Not only was the talent on-screen going to be split between Raw and SmackDown, but the writers for each show would also be divided up as well. Again indecision in this area added to Bischoff’s frustration.
Eric Bischoff continued:
“What made it harder for me, a lot harder for me was the writing staff was also going to be split so that there was going to be dedicated writers for each show. Those decisions would change on a weekly basis all the way up until the show was launched. My focus, my goal, and I still believe this to this day, that there is a much better process to be had in the way wrestling is produced, across the board, not just in WWE. There is a much better way, a formula that one could use that could at least attempt to create a more coherent storyline and product, but the way wrestling has been produced doesn’t allow for that.”
“There’s instinct, there’s knowledge, but there’s no formula applied. There is a formula to everything and my goal was to create that formula in WWE, at least the framework for it so that ideas could go through a process that gave those ideas a much better chance of being a success than just let’s try this, lay it out on paper and then the day of go, change my mind, I don’t like that. That’s not a process, that’s an experiment and the odds of a process being successful are much better than an experiment being successful. I think the way wrestling is presented today, across the boards, is much more closely aligned to a weekly experiment than it is to a weekly process.”
Eric Bischoff has also recently spoken about if he would ever consider one more full-time run in WWE, although fans of ‘Easy E’ shouldn’t hold their breath.
Credit: 83 Weeks
h/t Wrestling Inc. for the transcription
