Ask 411 Wrestling: Is NXT a Success or a Failure?

Welcome guys, gals, and gender non-binary pals to Ask 411 Wrestling. I am your party host, Ryan Byers, and it’s time for week two of my most recent run on this here column.

Should you have any questions that you would like for me to answer, feel free to send them here, and, if you would like to follow me on Twitter, you can do so here.

And, of course, we have a banner. No, not Bruce. I know the Avengers are all the rage these days, but try to get them out of your head for a second.

Errata, Et Cetera

First off, I would like to apologize to everybody for the confusion that surrounded the Ask 411 posting schedule over the last couple of weeks as Jed Shaffer rode off into the sunset and I saddled up, which resulted in at least one double column week and one week with no column at all. Hopefully, things are straightened out now and we’ll be moving forward on a smoother road.

Second off, kudos to everybody who called me out on not being able to do basic math in my return to the column. In fact, WWE champions going into triple threat matches have retained their titles 63.2% of the time, not 36.8% of the time as originally reported.

Finally, one of our questions last time around focused on wrestlers who have used their entrance music for the longest period of time. I think that Ric Flair is still a clear winner in that category, though a couple of readers pointed out that Goldust has used the same basic theme music for that character since its debut in 1996, though whether you include him on the list depends on whether you want to disqualify him for the fact that his relationship with WWE has been very much on again, off again and he’s spent time in WCW, TNA, and the indies since he originally debuted the Goldust character and music. There’s also the issue of his altered theme song when he wrestled as The Artist Formerly Known as Goldust, but the less said about The Artist Formerly Known as Goldust, the better.

What You All Came For

Kicking off the questioning for the week, Stuart wants to know whether this whole NXT thing is even worth it.

Everyone talks about NXT being the perfect breeding ground for future talents to take the main roster WWE into the future, but just how successful at doing this is HHH’s project?

For every Shield there are many Bo Dallases, Tyler Breezes and Ascensions. So what is the ratio of NXT graduates who make it big in the WWE (top end of the card) to those who have not caught old man Vince’s attention and have therefore fallen by the wayside and either been released or treated as a joke.

This is a difficult question to answer because it’s pretty hard to define what constitutes “making it big” in WWE. You need talented wrestlers at all levels of the card, so part of me is hesitant to call a wrestler a failure just because he hasn’t been a main eventer and a world champion. Also, you have to ask yourself how much of a career outside of the WWE farm system a wrestler can have before you no longer label him as an NXT product despite logging some time at the Full Sail University campus.

With all that in mind, I have compiled some statistics to the best of my ability. I am trying to count only pure NXT products, so I am not including wrestlers who were called up the main roster and then bounced back, nor am I including wrestlers who spent lengthy amounts of time in other developmental systems (such as FCW) before landing in the current NXT. Of course, wrestlers who have substantial independent or international experience have also been left off the list, though, as noted above, in some cases that line starts to get pretty arbitrary. I am also not including wrestlers who have technically appeared in NXT but were only there briefly and/or because they were mainly brought in by WWE for another project, such as the Cruiserweight Classic, the Mae Young Classic, or the UK division.

I fully admit that reasonable minds can disagree about what constitutes success in wrestling and when NXT deserves credit for producing a wrestler, so feel free to yell at me in the comments if you think I really mucked something up.

With that said, there are TEN purebred NXT products who I would consider to be main roster successes at this point, with those names being:

Alexa Bliss, Big E Langston, Braun Strowman, Charlotte Flair, Lana, Nia Jax, Roman Reigns, Rusev, Sasha Banks, and Elias.

Moving down in to the next category, there are TWENTY-FOUR NXT graduates who I would categorize as “neutral,” meaning that they are neither successes nor failures. This may be because they have only debuted on the main roster recently, or it may be because their main roster runs to date have been truly middling. I would place the following into that category:

Aiden English, Big Cass, Dana Brooke, Buddy Murphy, Jason Jordan, Mandy Rose, Ruby Riott, Samir Singh, Sunil Singh, Sarah Logan, Scott Dawson, Dash Wilder, Erick Rowan, Carmella, Chad Gable, Liv Morgan, No Way Jose, Rezar, Akam, Ember Moon, Alexander Wolfe, Killian Dane, Andrade Almas, and Zelina Vega

Finally, though I hate to cast aspersions on anybody’s career, there are ELEVEN names who transitioned from the yellow brand that I think you have to call failures no matter how you slice it. They are:

Adam Rose, Baron Corbin, Bo Dallas, Konnor, Viktor, Mojo Rawley, Simon Gotch, Summer Rae, Tyler Breeze, Enzo Amore, and Eva Marie.

With ten successes, twenty-four new or moderately good careers, and eleven failures, you actually have a pretty nice, even bell curve distribution. The extremely good and extremely bad outcomes are rare, and the majority of folks fall firmly in the middle. However, there is one other category of NXT alumnus that I don’t think is getting enough attention in our analysis, and that is the group of wrestlers who are let go before they even have an opportunity to make the main roster.

If my source (in this case Pro Wrestling Wiki’s List of NXT Alumni) is accurate, there are FORTY-TWO wrestlers who have come and gone from NXT without ever getting a chance at the big time. Here are their names:

Adam Mercer, Alisa Ceraso (a.k.a. Dani), Anna Bogomazova (a.k.a. Anya), Ashley Miller (a.k.a. Audrey Marie), Kenneth Cameron (a.k.a. Bram), Corey Graves, Ryan Nemeth, Shaul Guerrero, CJ Parker (a.k.a. Juice Robinson), Brandon Traven (a.k.a. Brian Breaker), Bull Dempsey, Cal Bishop, Carolyn Dunning, Chris Atkins, Christina Crawford, Denton Blackwell, Jody Kristofferson (a.k.a. Garrett Dylan), Memo Montenegro (a.k.a. El Hijo de Dos Caras), Ho Ho Lun, Hugo Knox, Jake Carter (a.k.a. Jesse White), Josh Woods, Josh Bredl (a.k.a. Bronson Mathews) , Judas Devlin, Kendall Skye, Knuckles Madsen, Marcus Louis, Skyler Moon, Joel Redman (a.k.a. Oliver Grey), Peter Howard, King Konstantine, Richie Steamboat, Travis Tyler (a.k.a. Drak Draper), Sara Lee, Sara Backman, Sarath Ton, Sawyer Fulton, Sylvester LeFort, Thomas Kingdon, Troy McClain, Veronica Lane, and Zahra Schreiber

These names are important because, even though we might not ever see them on Raw or Smackdown, they still represent individuals who WWE had to invest some amount of time and money into as part of the company’s look for the next big breakout star. As it turns out, over 50% of NXT competitors don’t even wind up getting a national stage to determine whether they can sink or flop.

So, is the NXT model successful overall in creating stars?

Maybe.

Thusfar, the true hits have been few and far between. However, that’s the nature of making a star. For every Rock there are a thousand Steve Blackmans just like for every Tom Hanks there are a thousand Clint Howards. I don’t think that the raw number of successful main roster acts can be your measuring stick of how well a developmental territory does. You have to look at whether the very best of the best are becoming major stars and drawing money, and you have to decide whether the amount of money that they’re drawing justifies the expense of putting wrestlers who just don’t hack it through the system.

Erik‘s favorite actors are John Travolta and Nicholas Cage:

How many one-on-one contests have there been featuring a wrestler fighting against “himself”? The three that I can think of are Undertaker vs. Undertaker, Kane vs. Kane, and Sin Cara vs. Sin Cara. I know Sting and “Bogus” Sting were out there as well, but I’m not sure the two ever had a one-on-one match. Were there any others?

Really, you’ve identified the three big ones, which, just for the record, are:

1. The Undertaker (Mark Calaway) vs. The Undertaker (Brian Lee), WWF Summerslam 1994

2. Kane (Glenn Jacobs) vs. Kane (Drew Hankinson a.k.a. Luke Gallows), WWE Vengeance 2006

3. Sin Cara (Jorge Arias a.k.a. Hunico) vs. Sin Cara (Luis Alvirde a.k.a. Mistico/Caristico), WWE Hell in a Cell 2011

In fact, WWE even released a video a couple of years ago entitled “Five Superstars Who Faced Themselves,” in which all three of these bouts were mentioned.

The other two “matches” that rounded out the WWE video were Goldberg vs. Gillberg, which I don’t think really meets the criteria of this question (nor was it really a match) and Sting vs. nWo Sting, which again was never a proper singles match, though the two Stings were briefly on opposite sides of the War Games match at Fall Brawl 1996 and faced each other again in a tag team match when Lex Luger and the original Sting defeated The Giant (a.k.a. Big Show) and nWo Sting on the May 25, 1998 edition of WCW Monday Nitro.

There are also some slight variations on this type of match which you may or may not choose to include depending on how you set the criteria. For example, if we go back to the Global Wrestling Federation, “The Patriot” Del Wilkes was attacked by and feuded with a character named the Dark Patriot, who was played by Doug Gilbert. The two had singles matches that were taped on January 31, 1992 and February 21, 1992, with the first of those matches being the Dark Patriot defeating the Patriot for the GWF North American Title. Though the Dark Patriot had a distinctly different look than the Patriot, he did claim to be the Patriot’s “dark side,” so I’ll leave it to the reader to determine whether this qualifies as a man wrestling himself. It’s also worth noting that, oddly enough, the Dark Patriot actually became the more prominent member of the GWF roster over time due to Del Wilkes leaving the company not long after their feud began.

Of course, if you’re going to count the Patriot vs. The Dark Patriot in answering this question, you also have to consider the decades-old feud of Tiger Mask versus Black Tiger. For those not in the know, Tiger Mask is a character that has been handed down over the years to several different wrestlers in Japan, and Black Tiger is a similar character created to be the heel rival to Tiger Mask. There have been four different canonical Tiger Masks (Satoru Sayama, Mitsuharu Misawa, Koji Kanemoto, and Yoshihiro Yamazaki) and seven different canonical Black Tigers (Mark Rocco, Eddie Guerrero, Silver King, Rocky Romero, Tatsuhito Takaiwa, Tomohiro Ishii, and NOSAWA Rongai), with the following combinations of tigers feuding with each other:

1. Sayama and Rocco (including singles matches on 4/21/82, 5/26/82, 8/29/82, 9/21/82, 1/17/83, 1/21/83, 1/29/83, 2/7/83)

2. Kanemoto and Guerrero (including a singles match on 9/23/92)

3. Yamazaki and Romero (including singles matches on 5/14/05, 10/8/05, 2/19/06, 6/2/06, and 4/5/09)

4. Yamazaki and Takaiwa (including singles matches on 4/22/09, 5/6/09, 6/13/09, and 6/20/09)

There was also a baseball-themed offshoot of the Tiger Mask gimmick in Osaka Pro Wrestling called Tigers Mask, portrayed by current All Japan wrestler Atsushi Maruyama, and he had his own “dark” rival Black Tigers, portrayed by former WCW/NWA Wildside wrestler Jeremy Lopez. Those two had O-Pro singles matches on January 5, 2003, March 15, 2003, and finally on March 22, 2003, in which Tigers Mask defeated Black Tigers in a mask versus mask match.

(And, before anybody swoops in to correct me, yes I’m aware that Minowaman did a one-off as the fifth Tiger Mask and Kota Ibushi has done a handful of matches as “Tiger Mask W,” but I don’t think anybody is actually counting those.)

I would also be remiss if I didn’t plug one of my favorite evil imposter groups, the “imposter army” that invaded Michinoku Pro Wrestling in 1998. Two of the top babyfaces in the promotion at the time were the Great Sasuke and the aforementioned Tiger Mask IV, and they were confronted by evil versions of themselves Sasuke the Great (journeyman junior heavyweight wrestler Masao Orihara) and Masked Tiger (BattlArts competitor Takeshi Ono). Eventually, the imposters would also be joined by NANIWA (a.k.a. Tsubo Genjin), an evil version of existing M-Pro wrestler Gran Naniwa. Because Michinoku Pro was more of a lucha-based promotion, this feud actually didn’t result in any singles matches that I could find a record of, but there was a double mask match with Tiger Mask and the Great Sasuke facing Masked Tiger and Sasuke the Great on September 23, 1998. The original wrestlers won, but the Great Sasuke told the imposters that they did not have to unmask, which let to tension and a feud between Sasuke and his running buddy Super Delfin, who wanted to enforce the stipulation.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!!!!!!

As many of you may know, in lucha libre, it’s actually not that uncommon for a wrestler to take over a popular gimmick when the individual who originated the character leaves the promotion who owns the rights to the look. Occasionally, the man who originally portrayed the gimmick will return to do battle with his replacement.

One of the first and best-known versions of this occurring involved the La Parka character. The La Parka who many American fans will remember from WCW was the first man under that hood, but, when he parted ways with Mexican promotion AAA, the company’s promoters put a new competitor under La Parka’s skeletal hood while the original adopted the similar moniker L.A. Par-K (sometimes stylized as L.A. Park). More than a decade after the original Parka defected from AAA, he was convinced to come back to the company, where he main evented TripleMania XVIII on June 6, 2010 against his replacement in a match where the rights to the La Parka name were allegedly on the line. L.A. Par-K won that match, though the replacement La Parka continued to be billed as such because, you know, it’s wrestling. The two would go on to have additional singles matches on July 4, 2010, July 24, 2010, and August 15, 2010.

Though it didn’t have nearly as high a profile, a similar situation occurred with the original Psicosis when he left AAA. On returning to Mexico after being unmasked in WCW, he competed under the name Nicho El Millonario and faced the man who replaced him as Psicosis in at least two singles matches in April 2005.

Plus to show that this sort of thing is still going on – and to bring things full circle to the beginning of our answer – the man who first popularized the Mistico gimmick and went on to become the original Sin Cara in WWE currently wrestles under the name Caristico (a combination of Sin Cara and Mistico) in Mexico’s CMLL promotion, and, on April 9 of this very year, he just had a singles match against the man who currently portrays the Mistico character.

I am sure there are plenty of other examples of wrestlers facing themselves that I’ve missed, particularly with the expanded criteria that I applied to the question and particularly in the world of lucha libre, which I readily admit is probably my biggest pro wrestling blind spot. If you’ve got further examples, feel free to mention them in the comments!

Keith reads the signs, respects law and order:

How the hell did WWE pull off the hanging of Big Boss Man by the Undertaker at Wrestlemania 15?

This is actually a pretty simple answer. The Boss Man was wearing a harness on his back that was lifting him up, making certain that the noose used in the angle wasn’t putting any actual pressure on his neck. If you watch the footage of the “hanging” (which I hadn’t done for several years before going back to it for this column), you can see that it takes a mind-bogglingly long time for the Undertaker to get the rope around his opponent’s throat and the cameras cut away quite a few times because Taker is actually getting the harness set up. Similarly, once the Boss Man gets up into the air, you can see something pulling up on the back of his shirt and vest, which has no reason to happen if he’s being suspended by his neck. The production staff even tried a bit of a misdirection play once he was up in the air, as, once again, there were quite a few camera cuts away from the man and the lights were immediately dropped to make evidence of the harness more difficult to see.

What I personally find more confusing than how the trick was done is how the company followed up on it. Wrestlemania XV took place on March 28, 1999, and Boss Man wrestled again for the WWF on March 30, 1999 in a match against Darren Drozdov taped for Sunday Night Heat, which aired on April 4.

The announce team of Kevin Kelly and Michael Cole acknowledged that the Boss Man had been hanged, but they didn’t sell it as having any lasting physical effects. They simply said that the attempted murder left Boss Man in a “foul mood,” psychologically changing him to the point that, during his squash match, he ripped out Droz’s nose ring.

Jon wants to riddle me this:

It’s my opinion that Matt Riddle is the best prospect currently on the Indy scene and he’s more than ready for NXT. Why hasn’t WWE brought him in yet?

With many of these questions about why WWE has or hasn’t signed particular talent, we can only wonder, but here we’ve got some pretty direct evidence. Check out this clip of a conference call with Triple H that was held shortly before NXT Takeover: San Antonio in January 2017:

For those of you who can’t listen to the audio, Dave Meltzer asks Triple H for his thoughts on Matt Riddle and where he might be on WWE’s radar. In the question, Meltzer alludes to the drug test failures that got Riddle fired from UFC and suggests that might be a reason that he’s not been brought into developmental as of yet. Trips doesn’t mention drugs explicitly but says that some of the factors Meltzer mentioned are in play and that he believes in second chances, though sometimes men need to go through a period of proving themselves before they get that second chance.

So, things may have changed in the past year, but based on the best information we have at the moment it appears that WWE isn’t interested in picking up somebody who was cut from UFC due to being a habitual pot smoker, at least not until it’s been shown that he’s cleaned up his act a bit.

For whatever it is worth, Riddle from around the same period recalls his interaction with HHH being fairly limited:

Big Dave wants to keep the bun in the oven a bit longer:

For years people would say that wrestlers such as Bobby Roode, Samoa Joe, or AJ Styles were wasting their time in TNA and now they’re doing well in NXT/WWE it is easy to say those people were right. However, you go back just a few years, and ex-TNA guys weren’t doing so well. Who are some guys (TNA/indie/wherever) you think would do much better in WWE than they did if they had waited a few more years to debut?


We’ve already talked about him quite a bit in the column and he might be low hanging fruit in terms of coming up with an answer to this question, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the original Sin Cara in answering this question. This is a guy who gained incredible international popularity, and, as a result, it was felt that he could transition immediately to the WWE main roster. However, the people who made that decision (perhaps even Cara himself) failed to account for the fact that he had wrestled almost exclusively in Mexico, where, even though the style has been Americanized quite a bit compared to where it was twenty years ago, things are still handled quite a bit differently than they are in the United States. Heck, even the rings in the two countries are vastly different. WWE tried to bridge the gap by initially feuding him with Chavo Guerrero, Jr., but they failed to account for the fact that, despite being born to lucha libre royalty, Chavo himself wasn’t really a luchador, as he’d spent 99.9% of his career in the United States. (He only had two years as a wrestler under his belt when he started working full time with WCW during the Nitro era.) Had old Caristico kicked around the United States over even done more work in Japan for a couple of years before coming up to the big leagues, I suspect things would have turned out a lot differently for him.

Our next couple of entries on this list were a team for a period of time, holding the FCW Tag Titles under the names CJ Parker and Donny Marlow — though New Japan Pro Wrestling fans know them better these days as Juice Robinson and Tonga Loa. (Loa, of course, had a run in Camacho on the WWE main roster in between his time as Marlow and his time as a Guerilla of Destiny.) Both of these men wound up on the New Japan Pro Wrestling roster not long after getting cut by the E, and they both developed leaps and bounds while there. Robison is probably the single most improved wrestler of the past year and is a legitimate upper midcarder for the promotion, and Loa, though not quite as polished, is a perfectly acceptable tag team wrestler. If either one of these men would have spent time in New Japan or higher level independents BEFORE going to WWE, they just might have had bigger runs in the biggest promotion in the world.

Last but not least, I would suggest that Serena Deeb’s time in wrestling could have worked out a little bit better if she’d held off on going to WWE. I was actually in the crowd live for some of Deeb’s earliest breakthrough matches with SHIMMER, and she had talent right from the get go. After a couple of rounds of plastic surgery gave her a more “conventional” WWE look, it was clear that she was going to wind up there sooner rather than later. However, once she arrived, she was axed in a matter of months without ever really making an impact in the company’s women’s division, which was allegedly the result of some out-of-ring incidents in which she did not show the highest level of maturity. Perhaps with a couple more years working high level independents or in a lower level national promotion like TNA she would have been better suited to handle the pressures of the WWE roster. However, by all accounts she is now doing quite well for herself, as she became a coach at the WWE Performance Center last year.

And that does it for this week. One more time, don’t forget to leave feedback in the comments below, send me questions here or follow me on Twitter here.