The NXT Breakout Tournament can be a powerful tool to build new talent

When booked competently, there are few things in wrestling that can match the excitement of a tournament. After all, there’s a reason why fans get excited for New Japan Pro Wrestling’s G1 Climax or Pro Wrestling Guerrilla’s Battle of Los Angeles almost every year.

Whether a championship, championship match, a contract from the promotion, or bragging rights are on the line, a quality tournament can accomplish plenty of things for a wrestling company: create a pretense for high-quality matches with compelling stakes, give wrestlers a place to showcase the full range of their skills, set up storylines based on the outcomes, and allows rising stars to make a name for themselves.

The latter objective applies specifically to the NXT Breakout Tournament. Even though WWE’s developmental brand has only staged two of these events, both succeeded in introducing fresh talent that would become mainstays on the show.

The NXT Breakout Tournament can help WWE establish fresh talent effectively.

Even though the Breakout Tournament only produces one winner at a time, stars such as Cameron Grimes, Isaiah “Swerve” Scott, Ikemen Jiro, and Odyssey Jones used the platform to ingratiate themselves to the NXT audience through their character work and in-ring skills in an environment where fans had reason to invest in their success or failure.

Of course most wrestling matches — again, when booked and promoted properly — can achieve this goal on their own, but the more focused format of a single-elimination playoff with a prestigious prize waiting on the other side eliminates the need to throw in an unnecessary subplot to “add MORE stakes”, thus giving the talent the space to connect with the viewers.

The first two Breakout Tournaments have shown what this looks like in practice, with each participant getting a chance to explain their motivations in a compact video package and everyone getting plenty of time to tell a full story in the squared circle. It hasn’t been perfect, but the NXT crew has established a framework for getting wrestlers who are new to NXT fans over without resorting to squash matches. All it takes is a couple of good matches and a couple of good promos, and you’re a made wrestler.

Unfortunately, NXT being run by Vince McMahon and Bruce Pritchard now doesn’t spell good things for the tournament’s future. All you need to do is look at how that “brain trust” has mucked up this year’s King of the Ring and Queen’s Crown Tournaments to figure out that a Breakout Tourney under their watch would suffer a similar fate.

Even looking at the 2021 field, they’ve already administered their main roster touch to most of the wrestlers. The popular Ikemen Jiro has already been reduced to “guy who everyone likes but loses all the time”. Duke Hudson has gone from “tall guy” to “tall guy who plays poker”. And Joe Gacy’s new character — the end result of a right-wing Dr. Frankenstein reanimating a pile of buzzwords — might win Worst Gimmick of the Year.

It’s a shame McMahon can’t put together a good tournament, because a bracket with some of the new names that have filtered into NXT 2.0 would have been a great way to introduce those fresh names instead of, say, having someone beat one of the challengers to the NXT Championship before said championship match happens later in the night or putting someone in a title match despite having zero matches, let alone wins, to their name.

It would still be worthwhile to do, though, so hopefully, Vince and the gang keep this as an annual event and put some effort into maintaining its quality. Who knows, it might even help the company get over those WrestleMania main eventers it claims this new NXT is striving to develop.