Vince Russo saw the report claiming ESPN already plans to walk away from WWE once their five-year deal ends, and he wasn’t buying it for a second. He also spent a pretty good chunk of time roasting the reporter behind it.
Speaking on The Coach and Bro Show, Russo went directly after BJ Bethel, who originally reported that ESPN would not renew its WWE deal after the current contract expires. Russo first questioned Bethel’s reporting by bringing up his previous claim about AEW viewership on HBO Max.
“The individual’s name is BJ Bethel. It’s the same Bethel who came up with the number of 500,000 people watching AEW on HBO Max, where there’s no such number out there. No one has been able to find this number. HBO and Max don’t give numbers for AEW, but he had it. And Meltzer now swears by that number.”
Then Russo stopped talking about the report entirely and started going after Bethel’s name. Russo kept going, arguing that whatever childhood nickname Bethel may have had should have disappeared years ago.
“Let me give BJ some advice. When you’re a grown-ass adult man, I don’t think you should be referring to yourself as BJ. With all due respect, if you were being called that when you were 5, or maybe even 10, and your friends are still calling you BJ—bro, by 13, at some point you gotta stop. Seriously. An adult man should not be known by the name BJ, ever. Start using your real name.”
Once he got that out of his system, Russo actually turned back to the ESPN story. His biggest problem was the timing. WWE and ESPN are only one year into a five-year agreement, so Russo couldn’t understand why ESPN would already make a final decision about something that won’t happen for another four years.
“This is a five-year relationship. If WWE is unhappy, if there’s internal talk, that’s one thing. But no partner is going to say one year in, ‘We’re dropping you.’ Bro, you gotta work for four years. No one is ever going to say that on a business level.”
Russo also argued that there’s simply too much time left to know what the relationship will look like when renewal talks eventually arrive. He compared it to a baseball team giving a player a five-year contract and deciding after one average season that he already has to go.
“#2, it’s year one! We don’t know what’s gonna happen in years two, three, four, or five. It’s like a major league team signing a free agent for five years, and in the first year he hits .260, and the organization says, ‘Well, we’ll have to get rid of this guy.’ There is no logic to this whatsoever.”
Russo’s skepticism also comes after ESPN itself publicly denied Bethel’s report. An ESPN spokesperson told Justin Barrasso on August 25 that “there is no truth to the report that we have decided not to renew.”
Whatever happens between WWE and ESPN four years from now is obviously still up in the air. For Russo, though, declaring the relationship dead after year one makes no sense—and apparently neither does a grown man still going by BJ.
What do you make of Vince Russo’s response to the report about WWE and ESPN? Let us know in the comments.
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