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Is the empire crumbling before our eyes?


flyonthewall2983

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This might put to bed any doubts over whether Vince is willing to end the empire (lifted straight from WhatCulture): 

"Ex-WWE creative team member Freddie Prinze Jr told listeners on his 'Wrestling With Freddie' show that FOX turned down the chance to buy the company outright back when they were negotiating terms to air SmackDown.

According to one of Prinze Jr's friends, who works as an executive at FOX, Vince McMahon's asking price was just too high - the network knocked back the chance to pursue a full purchase, and instead decided to license SmackDown for a still-hefty sum.

There had been chatter back in 2019 about FOX potentially moving to buy WWE, but it's incredible to hear that McMahon was so willing to cede control of his baby. Freddie also said that he'd been sitting on that story for a while, but couldn't resist telling it "because it has been long enough" since FOX were in the running."

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To the surprise of no one. Explains why they’ve made so many cuts to lower operational costs. I wouldn’t be shocked to see the Performance Center be completely gone by the end of the year. They legit don’t need it. The only reason they possibly did it in the first place was because somebody probably convinced them that they needed a bigger iron grip on the industry as a whole at the time. 

No more NXT map, thankfully.

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49 minutes ago, gonzalez said:

To the surprise of no one. Explains why they’ve made so many cuts to lower operational costs. I wouldn’t be shocked to see the Performance Center be completely gone by the end of the year. They legit don’t need it. The only reason they possibly did it in the first place was because somebody probably convinced them that they needed a bigger iron grip on the industry as a whole at the time. 

No more NXT map, thankfully.

There's no way, under the current vision, they get rid of the PC. How are you going to recruit NCAA athletes and non-wrestling fans to sign with WWE without a facility like the PC. Setting up a ring in Stanford or some warehouse with Norman Smiley isn't gonna get people in the door. 

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45 minutes ago, Reel said:

There's no way, under the current vision, they get rid of the PC. How are you going to recruit NCAA athletes and non-wrestling fans to sign with WWE without a facility like the PC. Setting up a ring in Stanford or some warehouse with Norman Smiley isn't gonna get people in the door. 

Isn’t the reason those athletes are signing because they are getting their scholarships paid for by them? I don’t think they are necessarily signing with them with only the intent to join the WWE. Besides they‘ll probably go the farm system route like they did back in the day to  get operating costs even lower. 

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I think the idea of WWE not signing indie guys is overblown, if you look at the video from the recent tryouts, there are for sure indie wrestlers there, Josh Bishop sticks out to me, but these NIL programs and the recent classes at the PC, are full of NCAA athletes who they want to turn into wrestlers, and whether the athletes actually want to be wrestlers or are there just to take the money, I don't know. But, WWE is signing them because they want them to be wrestlers, and if you've seen the sort of facilities NCAA sports teams have, they'll have no chance of recruiting anyone from those programs with a ring and some free weights in the warehouse and some territory wrestler pontificating at them. 

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Is the opportunity to do forward rolls for Lord Tensai really that much more appealing for an NCAA athlete without any passion for the business? It seems to me that high-level athletes who are used to being coddled are a lot less likely to subject themselves to a bunch of Power Plant bullshit than experienced workers whose lifelong dream is to be a WWE Superstar. Who do they even have left to teach the actual basics of wrestling?

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I don't know what these NCAA athletes are thinking or how they're going to work out, and I have no clue if WWE's plans will work out, but if you look at who they want to sign and the things Nick Khan says publically, they see the PC as a recruitment tool for the sort of athletes they want. 

Brookside and Smiley teach the beginner classes, I believe. 

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Is Carlito still working somewhere? Given that it is too unrealistic to wish Carlos himself would be asked, I selfishly want Carlito to be a beneficiary of this WWE's forbidden door purely so that Michael Cole or whoever can call him a fiery youngster

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It seems HHH is still very low key as far as his status and role with the company at the moment but assuming and hopefully he fully recovers for his health issues, Do you think he would resume his same executive duties he's had from before or do you think he'd be more Stephanie and have more of a PR type role. I would imagine Shawn would rather have Hunter back helping him. Pretty much all Hunter's guys are gutted out  and I'm sure Shawn wasn't prepared to have to really head creative of NXT.

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I don't think anyone in NXT was prepared for what happened in the last couple of months but only Triple H knows if he can swallow his pride and go back to help out Shawn with NXT 2.0, knowing that everything that has recently happened is the result of him being scapegoated for being unable to stop the rise of AEW when they thought it'd be a piece of cake to do. And that's even if Vince feels he can't find someone else that he trusts to deliver his vision of NXT 2.0 to surround Shawn.

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It will be interesting to see if he would want to continue to steer the  ship of NXT because foe the most part you are going to be working with more raw talent and even the experienced guys, the company will be more inclined to move them to the main roster quicker rather than keep certain guys around just to keep tv strong. Unless they are able to push out some really exceptional talent to the main roster, it's good to be difficult for Hunter and company to gain the confidence of people like the Wrestling journalists it seems he had been trying to win over.  The previous system had Hunter very in tune with the Wrestling scene outside of WWE, he even had people like Regal who was even more in tune. Now in a sense they have to turn off that side of the brain and go back to the mentality of the cookie cutter look of Talent 

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MLW just filed suit against WWE for among other things, trying to get Vice to stop airing MLW programming. Apparently they've been messing with MLW's plans on several fronts including a streaming deal that supposedly was going to be "transformative" for them had it gone down. 

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