Eric Bischoff spoke about Dean Ambrose leaving WWE on the latest episode of the After 83 Weeks podcast with Christy Olson.
As the former President of World Championship Wrestling (WCW), Bischoff is uniquely qualified to provide insight on the situation. Bischoff dealt directly with countless major league stars and more than one of them let him know, “I’m out of here” due to frustration with their creative direction.
Dean Ambrose is a huge star that WWE spent years investing in departure, but Bischoff does not see it as a big loss for them.
“No disrespect at all to Dean Ambrose … I don’t think it matters at all,” he said. “That’s not because of Dean’s abilities or lack thereof. But in WWE right now WWE is the star. Everybody else on that roster is a costar, to one degree or another. Stars are now interchangeable.”
Bischoff said it doesn’t matter how big the star is. If somebody leaves, the WWE machine will keep moving forward .. and that’s by design.
The roster is deep enough, and the pool of talent is deep enough that whether it’s a situation like Roman Reigns, as devastating as that was, WWE shifted on the fly. They didn’t even have to hit the clutch. They just kept going, right? I think that that’s intentional.”
Talent Comes, Talent Goes
Bischoff believes that Vince McMahon has made a conscious effort to make talent secondary and make the WWE brand the real attraction. Talent comes and goes. People get injured, people retire, people jump to the competition. Vince McMahon has learned this lesson many times before. At the end of the day, the wrestlers are interchangeable and it’s WWE that endures.
“If you’ve invested all of your resources, not just financial but all of your television time and all that real estate into building up a character, and through some scenario that you couldn’t anticipate that character is no longer there, you’re in a rebuild situation,” he said. “That can be devastating. WWE has gone through that before. They learned that lesson. Vince McMahon learned what happened when competition comes along and takes your talent, and I think he endeavored to build a company that was for the most part impervious to that. He did it by making WWE the star, and the talent less significant than the show that they’re on.”
Listen to the latest episode of After 83 Weeks here:
