Eric Bischoff Thinks Storyline For NWO’s Debut In WWE Was a Stupid Idea

On the latest episode of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff discussed the debut of the NWO in WWE in 2002, a storyline in which they were introduced to “kill” the WWE. You can check out some highlights below:

On Vince McMahon’s storyline of bringing in the NWO: “No matter how smart you are, no matter how creative you are, no matter how much everybody thinks you’re a freaking genius, you’re still going to come up with some really stupid ideas. This was Vince’s stupid idea. Whether it was his idea originally and he just forced everybody to go along with it, or whether he took two or three ideas that he heard and he liked and tried to merge them and meld them together, as you said. And this is what they ended up with? Either way, it was stupid. It was really stupid.

“And it’s one of — I mean, you notice my top five reasons, they were all kind of interconnected. I mean, it really was the setup of the story, and now we’re talking about the premise of the story. The premise of the story is ridiculous. Nobody bought into it. It didn’t fit Vince’s character. No matter how much he tried to twist and turn the character and, ‘He’s the evil, maniacal one!’ All right, you can try to sell that, and some people will buy it. First five rows will buy it. After you get past the first five rows of ticket buyers, ain’t buying that s**t. So it was a bad idea that only got worse in execution. But yeah, right out of the chute, it just stunk the joint up.”

On diluting the brand and whether it could’ve been restored: “You’re only limited by your own lack of creativity and/or patience. Could it have come back? Absolutely, absolutely it could have come back. But it would have taken time, it would have taken a lot of planning. It would take it a lot of patience. You’d have to let it breathe. You’d have to let it go away. You’d have to let people mourn to the extent that they were even willing to mourn. At that point, most people were willing to just go, “Yay, finally, it’s over.’

“But you’d have to get to the point where, to a degree, absence would start to make the heart grow just a little fonder, if not more forgiving. And then find a way to bring it back. And there would probably be a dozen ways you could come up with by tomorrow that would start to sound exciting. Sure it could have. But nobody wanted it bad enough, nobody saw the future in it at all. And if they did they were probably looking at a very short term, ‘Let’s get a hot three months out of it, see what we can do. It it lasts, great. If not, so what? We made some money, move along. Let’s do another one somewhere down the road.’ But yeah, it could have been resurrected.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit 83 Weeks with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.