Question for the POSTMarks:
Should WWE implement an excrussion deal? For those not familiar with exchrssion’s those are when a promotion sends a guy out to perform around the world and then returns after time away (NJPW does this and Jay White returned in Jan to a prominent spot on the card).
WWE has two options with this that I see:
Send guys to NXT
Send guys into the wrestling world in some deal and perhaps control the bookings. (There is a very cool way to do this I’m which it looks legitimate that guys leave and come back)
I’d nominate Dolph Ziegler the be the first guy in desperate need of this. He could rebuild he brand and stock tenfold from being viewed in different light and having fresh feuds elsewhere.
I’d also nominate placing a Cruiserweight in the BOTSJ.
Any thoughts about this concept and how it might work (or not) for WWE and who you’d nominate?
It would be good but unfortunately the WWE don’t use this method.
The best we can hope for is for guys to legitimately go away (like EC3, Drew McIntyre, Matt Hardy, Cody Rhodes, etc) and then bring them back when their contracts legitimately expire and after they’ve reinvented themselves.
Unfortunately, a lot of guys either don’t want to give up their WWE paycheque or don’t want to put in the effort of reinventing themselves on the indies, so we get stuck with lifers like Dolph, who isn’t hot enough to move up the card but isn’t bad enough to be released.
Will never happen, but it’d be so useful for guys like Corbin, Big Cass and Elias. Don’t know what to do with Ziggler but I don’t think this is what is needed, in the indies he’d just do the same stuff he does in Wwe then come back unchanged.
When someone gets called up from NXT, I wouldn’t mind them sending someone down. I’d like to see a disgruntled main roster group, try and takeover NXT, feeling like they are above it.
You could give WWE some credit here in that they are experimenting with Pete Dunne who has defended the WWE UK Championship on some indy shows. Including against Impact’s Austin Aries which would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. What their doing with Dunne is unprecedented.
And Dunne is a bigger name for it in my mind. I like what they are doing with him. It’s a model I’d ideally like to see the entire business adopt but that’s ludacris speak.
They were doing that in the early days of NXT. Cesaro would fight on NXT while being on the main roster and I think it was a good way to build the character with longer matches that he would get on Smackdown or Raw.
I think it would be a great idea to rehab people who are struggling on the main roster. They can dominate a few matches on NXT. If Ziggler went down and won some close matches against someone like Johnny Gargano, Ziggler gets some heat with the hardcore audience and shows what he can do with a longer match. Then when Gargano gets his call-up he has an instant feud where he gets his win back.
As a concept I agree with the idea and to a certain extent they have done it a little bit with certain guys, like Danny Burch in NXT, being allowed to take bookings elsewhere under his Martin Stone name and PROGRESS being allowed to use the likes of Jack Gallagher and other NXT talents when they’re available… but I do think it should be something they take further and send guys like Lars Sullivan to Japan for a year, or Lio Rush to Mexico, Raul Mendoza to the UK or Rhea Ripley to mainland Europe, for example.
Where I disagree is with Ziggler being the first guy thought of for this. Ziggler is not a “Young Lion”, he’s not a trainee, he’s not going to be going out to learn a new style or how to work a smaller corwd, Ziggler is just tired. He’s got more in common with Cody Rhodes than Jay White. He should be released from his contract and let the dice roll on what he does next. WWE can keep an eye on him and if he becomes valuable they can re-sign him… but he’s too old and to well known to to be sent out into the world to learn new skills in the same way a Japanese dojo trainee is.
The point of an excursion to is to travel to a different region and learn to work different styles to the one you’ve learned in training. You work with different talent and in front of different crowds that respond differently to different things. It’s about rounding out your game. WWE travels everywhere, yes, but it’s all the same talent and all the crowds are trained to respond in pretty much the same way wherever they go - it’s nothing like the excursion experience.
They used to have guys like Kidd and Cesaro go down there and work programs. I don’t really understand why they don’t send guys like Ziggler and Hawkins down now that they’re cooling off (or were never really heated) on the main roster and have nothing real to do. There’s plenty of guys that would benefit from the lesser schedule, the new feuds available to them and the time away from the bigger audiences who are clearly bored with them.
Let’s face it, WWE aren’t doing anything with Dunne. They signed him to a contract that allows him to roam because they don’t have a spot for him on the roster right now and they wanted to scare ITV out of the World of Sport experiment by teasing a UK based show; it worked and now they have a bunch of British guys they don’t know what to do with. Sure, the Austin Aries thing was a big deal but the match was booked before Aries had even arrived in TNA, never mind won the title and the finish was designed to protect both men and save face for both companies involved so that it would cause zero drama and minimise the chance of WWE pulling their talent off the show.
One would think any different region would still have the same tastes of where those other little companies fans would go to the shows.
House show matches are looser and more fun…and working infront of 50 sweathogs in bullet club shirts isn’t some mythical crowd who judge more other fairweather fans. …they’re easier to work if you placate them specifically…that’s it.
I used Ziegler because he’s most similar to Cody in the sense he’s going nowhere in WWE but I could see him having “momentum” in a role outside the company. Something about being presented in a different setting - Cody, McIntyre, Ohno - have helped those guys get better. We can agree to disagree on if those guys are any better suited once they return to WWE but I don’t see how it could be worse than where they were originally before leaving for a while.