Sami Zayn beating CM Punk gave SmackDown one hell of a surprise, but Eric Bischoff thinks WWE needs to be careful about how often it reaches for that trick. The Undisputed WWE Championship has now changed hands on television four times this year, and Bischoff believes there comes a point where another title change simply stops feeling like a big deal.
Speaking on 83 Weeks, Bischoff was asked whether WWE risks reaching diminishing returns by moving its biggest championship around so often. For him, there isn’t some magic number WWE needs to stay under. It comes down to whether each change actually means something.
“The answer is obviously in the middle somewhere, deeply nuanced in the middle, and it’s sometimes kind of hard to find. But if you pare it down just to a simple conversation that you would have with someone that maybe really didn’t know much about professional wrestling, but you kind of wanted to explain how it worked, it’s pretty simple in terms of its building blocks.”
“You need a good guy, you need a bad guy, or bad girl, good girl, whatever, take your pick. You need that adversarial position between your two characters. You need a mission, a journey, there needs to be a path, and there needs to be stakes. And in combat theater, the stakes, the primary stakes, the stakes that above all else, including maybe in some cases family, is the belt.”
That belt being the biggest stake is exactly why Bischoff doesn’t want it bouncing around without a payoff. His preferred formula is much simpler: put the championship on a heel, keep it there and spend the time building the babyface fans are desperate to see finally take it away.
“That’s the perception that you’re trying to create. So, how do you protect it? How do you build upon it? And then how do you exploit it in a way that doesn’t diminish it? And I don’t have that answer. You know, people have tried it different ways.”
“I’m a firm believer that when you can, keep it on a heel for as long as you can until you really build that babyface, and then go.”
Bischoff’s warning came when he got into what happens after several title changes produce no real difference. Fans might not know whether business moved because of a new champion, but he believes they can still feel when the championship switch didn’t accomplish much.
“But doing it too often does diminish it. If the end result of it doesn’t change anything, it’s just, now you take it for a while. You drag it through the airport. I’m tired of checking this thing through baggage. Here, it’s yours. But on the business side of the equation, nothing really moves.”
“You do that a couple times in a row. Now, the audience may not know that you’re not moving the needle financially, but the energy will be there. There won’t be any increase in energy. There won’t be a result. It won’t have mattered. The belt change won’t have mattered.”
He knows that problem from experience. Bischoff openly admitted that he has been guilty of doing exactly what he’s warning WWE about.
“And if it changes a few times, and I’ve been guilty, Your Honor, okay? I’ve accepted my punishment. I’ve been living it ever since. Been there, done that. That’s why I’m so confident.”
“What I’m telling you is you have to be able to know when to say when. And doing it too often does diminish it.”
Bischoff isn’t asking WWE to treat every belt like it belongs in a museum. Secondary championships are different in his eyes because they can be used to give lower-card stories stakes or help move someone toward the world title.
“Those titles are probably less significant in terms of how often they can be changed because they don’t mean as much, other than perhaps a progression to, if they’re disciplined, a progression to a world title shot. That would be, that’s cool, I think.”
“But I don’t think anybody’s been really disciplined enough to do that in a long time consistently. So, they’re basically just there to help provide stakes to the story that they’re trying to tell on TV in the lower cards. And those titles probably do have to be switched more frequently because of the nature of what they are and what they’re designed to achieve.”
For the world championship, Bischoff wants something different. If WWE is going to take its biggest prize off somebody, he believes that moment should generally feel big enough to belong on one of the company’s biggest shows.
“Whereas your main championship, I think, should be your PLE, your WrestleMania, your All In, whatever your relative event is. They should be special occasions.”
Zayn’s win over Punk is what brought the conversation up in the first place. Zayn won after Candice LeRae, Johnny Gargano and Kevin Owens became involved, with Owens accidentally striking Punk with the championship before Zayn landed the Helluva Kick.
Bischoff isn’t arguing that Zayn specifically shouldn’t have won. His issue is much bigger than one champion. If WWE keeps going back to world title changes for another big television moment, eventually the surprise itself may stop feeling surprising.
Do you think WWE is changing its top championship too often, or does it make RAW and SmackDown more unpredictable? Let us know in the comments.
This transcript was produced exclusively for Ringside News from the original recording. Republishing the transcription in full is prohibited. When using excerpts, provide prominent credit and a link to this article.
