Quote:
Originally Posted by RainMaker
But it goes beyond that. The midcard builds the future stars. Almost all your major stars over the last decade have come from the midcard. A midcard that was strong. Now that they have no midcard, they haven't been able to build a star in 5 years.
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Well they've certainly built up Cena/Orton from the midcard in the last 6-7 years - of course THOSE particular pushes are widely considered terrible things (not by you, but that's a general internet consensus that those guys "suck" now). The last 5 years have been weaker, though many guys have been elevated (Punk, Miz, Jeff Hardy and Edge before they left most notably). I don't think any of those guys or anyone else, until Punk, have connected with the audience the way Orton and Cena have, and I'm not really sure who COULD have with better booking. But how many 5-7 year periods have given any promotion a half a dozen legitimate home-grown new main eventers? I don't think that's possible. There's the awesome 2002-2005 period (which again, marked a huge ratings and buyrate decline, and everyone on the internet bitched about it at the time, but now remembers it as some kind of golden age), but the WWE largely just built off the success of the WCW midcard from the late 90s. Those guys were already over (Benoit, Jericho, Guerrero, etc), any idiot could have thrown out the those guys every week and had good wrestling (if not good business). If the WWE had access to a half a dozen nationally known midcarders from another promotion right now, I'm sure they'd have a different kind of show - but that's not the wrestling landscape anymore. While a couple of guys broke through the attitude era midcard to better things, most didn't.
Cena and Orton were both also probably pushed too early....they're still both still young, just entering their primes now.....And people talk about them like they're 40-something year old Kevin Nash in 1999 WCW. Those are the top two stars. Not a lot of promotions, throughout history, had better or more over #3s and #4s than the WWE does now, and if they did, it was mostly from just stealing guys from other promotions (something that isn't an option anymore). (i.e, WCW late 90s - all WWF guys, WWF early 2000s - all WCW/ECW guys.)