The last few years, NXT as become more and more popular with the hardcore wrestling fans and wrestling media. But that popularity hasn’t translated well when those wrestlers get called up to the main roster. In fact, more and more fans and journalist are ready to point that fact out.
But when you look at the history of wwe and his developmental territories, it’s not something new. Back in the day when they started with OVW, vince and company would do the same thing, just ask cornette or heyman how many guys WWE screwed up when they got called up. Same thing happened with deep south and FCW. They’re been more call up failures then success the difference between then and now is that now, at less half of the main roster’s audience actually watch NXT so they are more exposed to the development of the talent in the system then ever before.
The thing is, we have a difference of philosophy between vince and hhh. Vince still see NXT as a developmental territory, a place where he can send guys to train in the wwe style and then bring them up and make what he wants with them. I’m sure that if you ask vince, he doesn’t even see how successful NXT is because it doesn’t show on the financial reports he gets every quarter. To him it’s just more programming for the network.
HHH on the other hand, he see NXT as a way to start his legacy and to go in competition and beat the ROH and AEW of the world just like vince did with all the territories in the 80’s.
So until vince realize that NXT is way more then just another developmental territory, we’re going to have even more failure with call ups then ever before because the biggest setback these nxt wrestlers have that others in previous developmental feds didn’t have, is that they have global exposure so they are judge harder then anybody else they came up in the system in the past and in the end.