There are so many reasons why he did fail, that you could write a book about it.
But the company was pretty much dead in the water already, when he arrived.
His creative was the absolute shits in WCW, and he exposed himself with that, trying to make a bad WWF knockoff out of WCW, when they didn't have the starpower, and fans didn't want to see that.
You had TimeWarner executives who don't know shit about wrestling, starting to dictate how the creative process should be.
Goldberg was gone between the end of 99 to may 2000, because he was a dumb fuck, smashed a window with his forearm and sliced an artery in the process.
Bret Hart and Scott Hall were pretty much gone by early 2000.
Hogan left in July, because he had a surgery, and they didn't want to pay him.
So it basically left them with a thin Main Event, and a lot of filler talent that lacked charisma.
It's funny that Russo bitches about the smaller guys of today, when he was responsible for pushing a ton of small guys in WCW.
He pushed Lance Storm to the moon, made Billy Kidman beat Hogan an so on.

 

He couldn't resist putting himself on tv and making himself a main character. Probably saw the inmates running the asylum and thought, "screw it. I want to be famous too".

 

He didn't contribute anything and time has shown this

 

There were people in WWE filtering out his bad ideas, that didn't happen in WCW.

 

WCW needed someone to try and steady the ship and eventually go again, instead it got a maverick captain in Russo and there was nobody there to control him like Vince McMahon and whoever else there was above him in WWF.

WCW still had a good roster in it's dying days, who knows what may have happened had it went to Bischoff's consortium.

 

Eh, a lot of midcarders masquerading as main eventers like Jeff Jarett, Booker T, Scott Steiner. Goldberg was their biggest star but let's say WCW continued people would have gotten tired of him IMO.

 

I wonder why Russo is pretty much the only writer we put on this pedestal and seek to give him credit for everything that happened in his era.

But if you're looking at why he failed in WCW ir's because Jeff Jarrett is not Austin. It never was Russo carrying the product. He did have a lot of good ideas and deserves his appropriate share of credit but the wrestlers are the draws not him. People came to see Austin, Rock, Hollywood Hogan, Goldberg not to see some writer plug in 25 title changes in a year.

 

Because he never wrote for the main event guys in WWE

McMahon was the one booking Austin Rock and probably DX and Taker, he never cared about the midcard or below where Russo was writting all the crash tv shit angles and story for Val Venis etc,

Russo couldn't even a write a "XXXXXX on a pole" so let along booking a company to save them

 

There is no way I believe Vince was writing those segments like when Austin came out on a beer truck.

 

Let's not forget, he made himself champion even if it was briefly and he made David Arquette one too. He made their World Title worthless.

 

This subject has been talked about to death, but the crux of it is he didn't have his Vince McMahon filter to take away 90%+ of shit that comes out his mouth.

Like if Hogan laying down for Sting to pin him happened in WWE it would still be one of the subjects that's talked about as 'worst things WWE did'. People forget about it happening in WCW because its just one of about 100 terrible things that happened in that 12 month span.

 

I like that Vince Russo wanted to elevate the young guys to the next level. He still disrespected legends like Hulk Hogan. Vince Russo also created garbage like Standards And Practices where the fans could learn about backstage stuff and Judy Bagwell on a pole match. That was never going to get WCW high ratings.

 

I think a lot of if was to do with the fact that WCW was in serious decline and it didn't really matter what russo did because the company was in a bad place. when russo first came in the ratings actually went up and he tried to push the younger talents. the truth is that the company was losing a lot of money and the higher ups at turner broadcasting didn't want wrestling on their network anymore so people trying to blame russo for the demise of WCW are idiots.

 

Because Vince Russo was trying to push jobbers over the top stars fans wanted to see.

The New Blood was garbage.

 

Vince McMahon who filtered great ideas from the trash such as this?:

 

Wrestling at it's core (especially back then before guaranteed TV deals and networks) is about getting people emotionally invested to the point that they are willing to spend their time and money to see the outcome of a "match".

Russo still doesn't understand this. He has little to no respect for the actual workmanship of the in-ring product. He thinks that all of the intrigue is in the skits and backstage segments. He's also an idiot of a storyteller and thinks that if you have a story with 4 chapters that you can blow through chapters 1 and 2 in record time because all he actually cares about is chapters 3 and 4. Then you add in the never-ending reliance on swerves and it's really no surprise that the guy has largely failed except for when he had all time greats in their prime

 

No Vince McMahon.

Vince Russo cannot notice talent or everyone's strengths and weaknesses. He thinks everyone can carry out his dumb stories when that's not the case. And WCW 1999/2000 wasn't nearly as talented. McMahon knew how to cast people and then tell someone to make up a story.

Russo also thought he mattered to wrestling fans in 1999 when the masses wouldn't have known he was a booker for McMahon. They just knew he was this NY idiot suddenly thrust on tv into a main role for no reason. So him wanting to be a tv star is also part of it.

 

I think beyond anything else and regardless of how small or large his contributions to the Attitude Era were, he was still the writer and whether it was McMahon or an additional stable of producers and other behind-the-scenes talents who were the magic makers that brought his ideas to life, the written word only goes so far and I don't think Russo's genius was ever in things like production or product branding, which are key. Like a five-star match, a scripted segment or promo only works as well as how it is presented on TV and I don't think Russo had the skill of getting things done like McMahon did.

I wonder why Russo is pretty much the only writer we put on this pedestal and seek to give him credit for everything that happened in his era.

Russo was the first to really promote himself as such. Patterson was, by most counts, the magic maker on creative, when it came to how things were built up during Hogan's peak but in those days, it wasn't about writing out promos and all that stuff. The same was kind of true of a lot of McMahon's secret weapons from Jim Johnston to Kevin Dunn to Kerwin Silfies. Some of it was about keeping kayfabe alive and not nodding the hat to those who pulled the strings, some of it was about Vince wanting to be the sole credited visionary, and a lot of it was just about the public not really caring about the smaller players and less interesting techniques required to develop a character into a star. WWF was always more than just working matches and writing scripts, they had people creating costumes, developing theme music, and as time went on, there were the pyrotechnics and all those small important elements that went into it.

Characters like Undertaker, Kane, early era Mankind, and so on and so forth require a lot of elaborate presentation to get them to where they are going. That movie trailer-level editing that they were starting to incorporate was important to getting the product over and while Russo was the one writing the segments, he didn't seem to be the one pushing the button to get them executed.

I feel Russo's decision to aid in helping kill kayfabe was definitely influenced by his need to establish credit for himself. Once people know the product is scripted, he can put himself over as the guy who wrote it. His introduction to WCW audiences was built off the narrative that he was the mastermind behind Raw's success. Prior to this, the credit was often given to the people who ran the companies, namely McMahon, Bischoff, and Heyman, though even Bischoff sometimes took a backseat to Turner in some discussions. Kevin Sullivan, despite being the guy booking during the hot WCW period, was not getting the kind of credit Russo would.

Those guys were near enough main eventers, the issue is they were shoehorned in to those positions quickly rather than getting a gradual push.

You could say Scott Steiner was ready for a main event push nearly a decade earlier. Double J was already an IC champ in WWE and US champ in his first WCW run, Booker T was the least legitimate in my opinion, but I think by 01/02 he would have been ready.

Don't forget Russo put the title on Bret, made Benoit a main eventer too and was also trying to get Jericho to jump ship back to WCW.

And this is the huge problem with Russo in WCW. He's trying to push everybody on to the stage at once. I rewatched WCW Mayhem a few years back and there is so much going on, it's ridiculous. There are some interesting programs going on but in some cases, it becomes redundant because they overbook the hell out of it. A Bret-Benoit finals where Bret wins the World Title could be interesting with the right story and a good emotional build (Bret winning his first major title in WCW and defeating the same guy he'd worked a tribute match with after Owen) but Russo infested it with his usual clusterfuck booking with numerous run-ins during the match on a show where they had already done a lot of that already. There were not one but two matches where male wrestlers worked against slender women with no wrestling experience at all. They did a Curt Hennig retirement angle that basically did nothing because a) it had been booked as an early on the show match that ended in under ten minutes and b) the audience had been conditioned to believe that inevitably this career-ending stipulation would not last.

Russo's death kiss as a writer/booker/promoter was he presented all TV as the same thing, whether it was free on cable or PPV, so every week, shows were flooded with big-time gimmick matches, title changes, and "Earth-shattering events" that weren't given time to resonate and often resulted in very short matches with lots of things happening that fans either forgot about or simply weren't followed up on properly. There was a little of this going on in WWF when he was writing but largely it was either on PPV undercards or done on free TV. The pay-per-view model largely requires a payoff for its audience and Russo never quite grasped that. The bait-and-switch works wonders on free cable because you are keeping the audience glued to the set and building to get them to the pay show. Switching up a main event that was announced on the fly on free TV tends to more forgivable than when you're offering up an advertised main event and at the last moment, throw in some schmozzy "faux shoot" where one guy just lies down in the ring and lets the other guy pin him and they do a different match altogether.

In fairness to Russo, the wheels were falling off of WCW an entire year before he got there. The ratings undergoing a major downtrend and fans started giving up, so whoever came in to clean that mess was dealt a really shitty hand.

He actually did increase the ratings in the 3 months where he was head of creative. He was no longer the head of creative when he returned and was made an on-air character. Russo was thrown on a Booking Committee. It wasn't a good fit. WCW was too political, and Russo didn't have a McMahon to protect him from the sharks backstage. He didn't have the freedom to write the show on his own.

That's not to say that he didn't have shitty ideas. He did, but to say that he was a complete failure in WCW given the circumstances is a bit of a stretch. Nash and Sullivan under Busch failed a whole lot harder in 1999 because they took a show that was doing regular 5.0s and lowered it to 3.0 in less than a year.

Any increase he brought to ratings was negligible at best. He might have had a slightly higher average per episode than the shows that proceeded him but he never eclipsed the consecutive 4's Nitro had gotten a month prior to him showing up and were still dipping to below 3's on occasion. Worse over, he absolutely torpedoed the PPV buy numbers. His initial involvement brought a healthy buy rate for Halloween Havoc at about 230,000 buys. That number went down by about 30,000 by the next PPV despite him resurrecting the tournament idea that brought him success a year earlier in WWF. Starrcade, despite traditionally positioned as the biggest show in WCW and being headlined by sentimental favorite, Bret Hart working with mega-star, Goldberg, fell off even harder in terms of buy-rates, sinking down to 145,000 buys (the second lowest drawing show of the year) so clearly, the paying audience was giving up on his ideas pretty quickly and I'm sure this factored into him being let go so early. He worked as a writer in WWF but really didn't seem cut out to run the show in WCW.

 

For what its worth both Russo & Bischoff have mentioned over & over that their creative booking potential was handcuffed by Standard and Practices. They simply couldn't go into the gutter to truly battle it out with the WWF for this reason.

I also think presentation has a little bit to do with it. WCW from 1999 onwards looked soooo 2nd rate. Like WWF-lite. A lot of people tend to gloss over the gutter-trash booking & kayfabe killing committed by the WWF mostly cause their product looked much prettier & more cutting-edge.

 

Russo WCW booking was almost like a parody of his 1997-1999 WWF run. Even if he was the driver of Attitude Era creative, which I think he clearly was, he had guys touching up his stuff in WWF

 

WCW should have signed RVD so he could be Mr. Monday Night. lol

 

They had a verbal agreement for RVD to join in the fall 2001, unfortunately WCW went under.

 

WCW 2000 getting put all on Russo is nonsense. The shit Sullivan booked after Vince left the first time was fucking awful. The Millionaires club vs. New Blood stuff was more entertaining than a lot of modern wrestling if you ask me.

 

The overall thing that helped WWF was WCW invested too much in established guys and not enough in future talents. They let their mid-level guys who were on the verge of being main eventers go in favor of older, more established WWF stars and held on too long to big contract guys who had no real place. The one thing Vince understood is the guys you pay top dollar for need to be in the spotlight because otherwise, why spend the money? He got bargain basement prices on a lot of the talent that WCW had been developing because he was offering them "opportunities" they wouldn't get if they stayed. On the other end, WCW basically bought out his most expensive contract (Bret Hart) at an even higher price because he was an established name but the reality of it was they didn't need Bret. They had no real plans for him and with Sting already being positioned as WCW's savior in the war against the N.W.O. and Goldberg emerging as their big young monster star, they basically paid him a fortune to be another name on the roster.

For what its worth both Russo & Bischoff have mentioned over & over that their creative booking potential was handcuffed by Standard and Practices. They simply couldn't go into the gutter to truly battle it out with the WWF for this reason.

There is certainly truth to the fact that they couldn't get away with what Vince was doing but creatively, aping that was only to going get them so far. They fucked up long before that. They ran out of steam in 1999 and didn't have anything new to go with. Bischoff had run out of ideas and Russo was just doing watered down and even more confusing takes on his WWF stuff.

I also think presentation has a little bit to do with it. WCW from 1999 onwards looked soooo 2nd rate. Like WWF-lite. A lot of people tend to gloss over the gutter-trash booking & kayfabe killing committed by the WWF mostly cause their product looked much prettier & more cutting-edge.

I would definitely agree with this. I thought the WWF booking in 1999 was pretty bad but the mixture of solid production and the product still being red hot kept them afloat. If nothing, the side by side on WWF and WCW in 1999 showed that when you are hot, you can get away with anything and when you're not, it's difficult to get away with much of anything.

Again, shock value had nothing to do with the downfall of the popularity of wrestling, during the Attitude era. WWE was forced to tone down the product, in the aftermath of Owen Hart's death, as the media was very critical of the product, and the company was under a microscope. Yet for the next 16 months the WWE continued to break all kinds of records in revenue and viewership.

I don't remember much in the way of toning down when it came to that sort of thing. They were still having women getting stripped down to their underwear pretty regularly and a lot of the same business. I think the shock value helped to some degree but I don't think it was everything.

I'm pretty convinced that the WCW may have gone under regardless of who was in charge. It would have taken too long for the company to undo all the damage of 1999, and they really had just 15 months before the buyout to turn a profit. before the AOL/Time Warner merger.

Even if WCW wasn't forced to close, they had an uphill battle. They had lost viewers and completely killed their own momentum. They could have pushed whoever but the best time to introduce new stars is when the current stars are still popular. Goldberg was able to blow up off the N.W.O. boom and Rock could also do this when Austin was huge.

Titles (especially non-World championships) were irrelevant with both WCW and WWE by 1998. They did not mean anything. The belts were tossed around like a hot potato, and were often given to wrestlers who were not over. IC title and US title may have meant something in the 80s and early 90s. However, by 1997, it was just a prob that meant nothing.

Correct. Adding so many extra belts and then the combined element of either having guys forfeit them, be stripped of them for stupid reasons, or just trade them back and forth over and over countless times in short periods made them completely useless. There was no excitement to seeing someone win the Hardcore Title in the WWF when it was changing hands a ridiculous amount of times in a single night and in general, when nearly every popular or prominent wrestler on the roster has won at least one belt, what is really left to get excited about?

By saying Jericho was "not ready" to be a star in 1999, I assume you did not follow WCW at all in 1998.

He was absolutely ready for the next step. I think this was what separated WWF and WCW. The guys who became the main event stars in 1998-99 were getting to work with the top guys in 1996-97. By the time Austin and Mankind became World champions, they had experience working at the top of the card. This was what worked against the next crop of guys in WCW. They weren't getting to be put out there with the bigger talents. The rare few who did (Goldberg, Page) got over.

WCW 2000 getting put all on Russo is nonsense. The shit Sullivan booked after Vince left the first time was fucking awful. The Millionaires club vs. New Blood stuff was more entertaining than a lot of modern wrestling if you ask me.

WCW was done in 2000. Benoit and gang leaving was a great roster addition for WWF and made for one of the last great head-to-head talent jump moments but even if Benoit had stayed on as WCW champion with the rest of them, it would have changed very little because the talent pool wasn't there anymore.

Didn't Jericho also lose to D'Lo Brown for the European Title on Sunday Night Heat, not to mention losing the IC title to Chyna.

In an ideal world, he should have been ready by mid 99, but in reality he wasn't.

He was ready to be elevated. A program with Goldberg in '98 puts him in a better position going into the new year. Even if he gets squashed, a PPV pay-off match allows him to get over as a heel more effectively.

Austin was screwed over, we know that, he should have been World champ at Starrcade 94.

He most certainly shouldn't have been. He shouldn't have had his legs cut out from underneath him either but he still needed time to get over. Even WWF took their time with the push. They didn't just have him win King of the Ring and then beat Shawn for the belt that year. He had a few big matches with Bret, an unsuccessful title shot against Taker, and they spent a long time getting him red hot before he won the title.

Had Flair stayed babyface in 1994 and the two worked a program, it would have gone a long way in getting Austin closer to where he needed to be but in truth, timing worked out in his favor. "Stunning" Steve was never going to have the kind of star power that Stone Cold did. The frustration that fueled him into reinventing himself as a pissed-off brawler was needed.

If WCW played it right, Dustin Rhodes, Cactus Jack, Steve Austin, Marc Mero and Brian Pillman all could have been WCW champions.

Oh boy! WCW champions. Never mind developing them as characters. Let's just give them honorary title reigns and people will pay to see them because even though most kids over the age of eleven were laughing at how fake wrestling was during this time period, winning a title would certainly have been the stepping stone to getting them over.

In an ideal world Foley should have had a title shot at Hogan and The Giant.

And virtually nobody would have given a shit. Foley winning the WWF title in 1999 meant something because Foley had been developed as an underdog journeyman talent who'd gotten over with their crowd.

 

I think we were all craving that Johnny B. Badd world title reign.

 

The wrestling world was robbed.