Why Vince McMahon Needs Competition for WWE to Return to Greatness

This is stating the obvious here, but WWE was at its best in the late 90’s-early 2000’s. Vince McMahon.

People say that being a TV-14 is a reason why WWE was such good programming back then. They only went to that rating because of World Championship Wrestling looking to compete and end Vince McMahon’s company.

That has led to many wrestling fans asking this question today – why does WWE not look to return to the more violent rating?

If you own the WWE Network and have watched the Monday Night War series, many people from WWE explained how adjusting and re-branding the company helped them win the the war against WCW. It was the reality that they have competition that drove them to do both of those things and churn out a terrific product.

On September 8, 2014 – Vince McMahon’s company has no competition.

I don’t think that you can call TNA Impact Wrestling a competing brand to WWE when a reason they abruptly moved their show to Wednesday night was in anticipation of WWE SmackDown going to Thursdays. That and their current TV situation, which doesn’t guarantee them living past the end of the year, gives them no chance of stealing viewers.

So with TNA not being a threat, there are no other companies that could give WWE a run for its money. Because of that, it’s the product that most wrestling fans turn to since they don’t have much of a choice.

Once McMahon bought WCW in 2001 and merged the companies, the product took a very steady decline. It began with the InVasion storyline, which was horribly handled. It was a golden opportunity for WWE to introduce plenty of great talents from WCW like Diamond Dallas Page, Booker T, Lance Storm, and others. Instead, they chose to place some of these new Superstars in strange storylines and bury a good chunk of them. Remember when DDP was stalking The Undertaker’s wife?

They had another opportunity with capitalizing on the return of the New World Order to wrestling programming. McMahon would instead devalue the talents of Scott Hall and Kevin Nash.

This carried on over the years with plenty of misused talent, a lack of storylines, and a strict hold on the performers. The latter was recently seen in the leaked Raw script from last week’s episode.

The lack of competition means that WWE can do any of those three things above and not have much to worry about.

Look at the past few weeks of programming since SummerSlam. Any word in the dictionary that’s negative could describe what’s been going on the air.

The success of last month’s pay-per-view have brought on lazy booking. Many of the feuds from that event have been carried over for Raw and Night of Champions, which means there isn’t any fresh content for the fans to see.

It’s also very well-known that they disregard the opinions of the fans unless they scream for months for a performer that they love.

The WWE Universe had to force the company to make Daniel Bryan a main event star. They appreciated his terrific in-ring work and his charisma. No one knew why WWE didn’t while they were in the process of putting Batista and Randy Orton in the main event of Wrestlemania XXX.

Then there’s Dean Ambrose, who is already way over with the fans. He’s a very good wrestler, has a terrific character, and has a ton of charisma. Yet, Vince McMahon and the rest of WWE seems to feel Ambrose cannot headline a show.

The crowd reaction to John Cena is something that is self explanatory as well. His heel turn is well overdue.

None of this really matters to WWE, though. They operate in their own, close-minded matter because they know fans have nowhere else to go to tune in for a good product.

All of this is why Vince McMahon and WWE desperately needs a competitor to wake them up and put out a consistently good product so they not only keep their current fans, but bring in new fans, no matter what their age is.

Even though this is a PG product, fans can still be attracted to the company product if they put on compelling storylines, followed by good wrestling matches. As Vince Russo said regarding storylines in the Attitude Era “We wrote from a fan’s perspective and what they wanted. The minute we left, they (WWE) went back to what they know – wrestling. At the end of the day, matches do not draw. Everything else does.”

WWE should be putting out a consistently good TV product for the fans whether there is competition from another company or not. It seems as though there needs to be something to light a fire under Vince McMahon to make fans satisfied.