WWE: Two potential strategies to help boost the flailing ratings

2. An offseason

This absolutely will never happen, but it is fun to dream, isn’t it? When you think of every single sport throughout the world there is always one common trend: they have an offseason.

That is what makes WWE so unique: there is no offseason and while it is not a professional sports league, it does feel like there is a WWE season, so new wrestling fans might be shocked to hear that there is no offseason.

One of the biggest problems with WWE is oversaturation and part of that problem is that the company produces weekly shows every single week of the year. Again, it is what makes WWE so different as it does not take a break as most successful television shows do.

An offseason would be beneficial to the company in multiple ways. First and foremost, it will make their performers happier and happier performers will help counter the downwards spiraling trend of people not wanting to work for WWE.

Second of all, it would give fans a break to get refreshed and get excited about what is next in the company. It can be hard keeping up every single week but if you know if the back of your mind that there will be 8-10 weeks without wrestling then you are probably more likely to tune in.

When is the best time for this break? Between Survivor Series and the Royal Rumble. The company can continue to put on live shows as a less frequent rate to give the wrestlers a break but there should be no new programming from the end of November to the end of January.

You could even make the case that the company can do it in the September-November range because of the NFL, which I would also be fine with.

The reason that WWE will never do this though is that although the ratings are plummeting, having two and a half million people watching is still better than zero.

However, you could make the case that in the long run this would be more beneficial to the overall ratings. Plus, WWE can still air “historic” episodes of Raw and SmackDown (or even pay-per-views) in the respective timeslots for those wrestlings die-hards that cannot get enough.

That is a way to keep the current product fresh, capture a group of fans that loves the nostalgia and allow the company to hit the reset button every year.