Can We Stop Kidding Ourselves and Can WWE Stop Lying to Us?

It is absolutely amazing to me that at this point creatively for the WWE, I still hear fans talking about a Raw/Smackdown draft and debating over which talents should go where.


People, The Brand Extension is dead. It doesn't exist anymore. The PPVs are all mixed branded. The GMs of both shows tell all wrestlers what to do. The "Smackdown" Money in the Bank featured "Raw Superstars". "Smackdown Talents" show up on Raw every single week and even compete for "Raw Championships" while Raw midcarders sometimes trickle on over to Smackdown. To illustrate my point, isn't Daniel Bryan technically a Smackdown wrestler? Last I checked, he was still "officially" part of the Smackdown roster? Alberto Del Rio is technically a Smackdown guy, but he appears on Raw pretty much every week.

Here's the set up: You have Raw, and then you have its B Show which is Smackdown, which only serves to be what Sunday Night Heat was back in the day. It is a show to showcase the midcard guys & lower, and that's it (and yes, I count WHC contenders as midcarders because that belt is a midcard title. I don't care what anybody tells me).

The idea that they want us to believe there is any kind of divide between Raw & SD talents is a joke, and the fact that I still see fans talking about a Brand Draft is ludicrous. If WWE actually tried it, I would laugh at them. They are making absolutely no effort to create the illusion that there are two separate rosters besides just telling us that is the case when all visual evidence points to the obvious opposite.

They have to completely change the way they do things to get me to buy into a "brand extension" but right now, it just doesn't exist.