I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but Vince Russo is exactly right. The former WWE and WCW Head Writer has been full of a lot of hot air since leaving the business, but on Wednesday’s episode of The Wrestling Inc. Podcast, Russo dropped a big truth bomb on WWE’s current mishandling of some of their newest stars. The man behind the Attitude Era and WCW’s final days discussed how he feels WWE has dropped the ball with new WWE Champion, Jinder Mahal as well as former NXT Champion, Shinsuke Nakamura.
“What a mishandling of Jinder Mahal three weeks as the champion,” Russo said about the current direction of SmackDown. “And they killed it. They dropped the ball… It’s horrendous what they did to this poor guy in the last three weeks.”
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“This is what they do with all these guys, Raj. Everybody just becomes another name on the roster. If you go back and you look at the Attitude Era show, every single show was built around who the champion was. And that championship and that title. Every show was built around that. That’s the most important thing on the show.”
“Yesterday, three weeks after winning the title, this guy was handled just like another wrestler on the show,” Russo commented about this week’s episode of Smackdown. “Bro, the announcers couldn’t have no-sold it any-more. When Shane announced he [Jinder Mahal] had a match with Mojo, the freaking announcers no-sold it. This is your freaking champion!”
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Russo’s comments didn’t just apply to Jinder. He believes WWE has a basic problem of overexposing their characters and feuds to the point that no one cares about the outcome.
“There’s a basic problem with the WWE, I’ll you what it is and this is what’s happening,” Russo stated. “We used to spend a lot of Monday Night RAW and a lot of SmackDown building characters and developing storylines. So by the time we got to the match, it was a big deal. What happened now is they don’t know how to make characters anymore, there are no storylines. Everybody just wants to fight each other. So when you take away the character building and when you take away the storylines, all you have are matches.”
“So every week bro, as you’re working towards the pay-per-view, these guys are in the same ring,” Russo explained. “Whether it’s a six-man or a tag or an eight-man, by the time you get the pay-per-view, you’ve seen these guys mix it up like three or four times before and it doesn’t mean anything.”
Russo also gave his thoughts on the booking of Shinsuke Nakamura since he’s been on the main roster.
“And Nakamura, as unique as the guy is, bro, what have they done,” Russo asked. “I saw a vignette of a guy yesterday painting. That’s the character build of Nakamura. I mean, that’s supposed to get me excited about this freaking guy?”
He’s not wrong.
