5 Lessons WWE Can Learn from NXT TakeOver: New Orleans

3. Stop fighting with the fans…

Modern wrestling fans are smartened up to the business more than ever before, and it is about time that the WWE creative department embraces it.

It has been a long time since wrestling fans were blindly willing to accept direction on who to support and how to react. Despite this being an undeniable fact in the wrestling universe, WWE still make attempts to forcefully sway their fans in directions they are obviously unwilling to go.

As a wrestling booker, if you try too hard to bend a story in a way the audience outspokenly rejects, it is only a matter of time before it becomes broken.

All while WWE exhausts every miracle method to put Roman Reigns over with their fans, NXT has successfully found a way to keep their product open to interpretation, reaction and suggestion.

There is no better example of this in NXT than Adam Cole and the Undisputed Era.

While the cocky, self-serving and heelish actions of the hottest NXT faction have the perfect makings of a traditionally heated and villainous unit, the NXT fans have unapologetically approved the Undisputed Era as a common favourite within the brand.

This was exemplified by the deafening pop heard when Adam Cole came out victorious in the ladder match, as well as when Roderick Strong double-crossed his partner, Pete Dunne, to help The Undisputed Era retain the NXT Tag Team Championships. Strong’s actions would traditionally be that of a hotheaded heel turn, but instead he put himself and The Undisputed Era over even more with the delighted fans.

NXT make no obvious attempts to fight their fans on what some creative teams would consider oppositional reactions. While NXT may be forced to censor the rampant “f–k you Ciampa” chants  heard from the vocal audience in the main event, you can guarantee they wont be editing in “boos” during reruns of The Undisputed Era’s victories from TakeOver: New Orleans.