Stevie Richards saw Jade Cargill and Tiffany Stratton’s WWE Night of Champions match, and he thinks the problem is bigger than one rough move.
Jade already caught heat after hitting Tiffany with a Black Hole Slam that Piper Niven ripped as sloppy and unsafe. Piper said Jade didn’t properly transfer Tiffany’s weight, which caused the move to look messy and made Tiffany’s head bounce off the mat. But Richards is looking past just that one spot.
While speaking on The Stevie Richards Show, he said the match showed what can happen when two wrestlers are still learning and neither one has enough experience to guide things when something goes wrong.
“Is this just two bad opponents for each other because all these all they’ve learned, I guess, is one way of doing things. Like with Jade, obviously she was kind of like Molly Holly in AEW initially only doing short matches and mostly being on the offense. And then she goes to WWE and took forever to debut, as well. Which kind of tells me like how limited she was. And then Tiffany Stratton as well… she’s only had five years of learning, but only in the WWE system from scratch. It’s an inherent danger where if the match goes wrong in one bit, it’s just going to completely collapse because neither of them are exactly ring generals.”
That was Richards’ whole point. He was not just blaming Jade or Tiffany individually. He was saying WWE is putting wrestlers in major spots before they have enough reps to adjust when things don’t go perfectly. Richards said there simply was not enough experience between them for either woman to fully lead the match if it started falling apart.
“Well, yeah. That’s definitely there’s not enough of a gap in experience to have anybody lead the match Have you really cultivated a pipeline to give these people enough knowledge and self-awareness to ad-lib, to call audibles? I don’t think there’s any audibles outside of the main event, do you? And even then, they’re very limited.”
Then he went after WWE’s developmental setup directly, saying the company is reaching a point where too many inexperienced people are working with other inexperienced people.
“We’re definitely hitting a point where the blind are leading the blind, right? There’s a lot of deals going on, a lot of angles and storylines in NXT and WWE where you don’t have a veteran. It’s like they’re almost like Seth Rollins said earlier, like, you know, the end is closer than the beginning.”
Richards then circled back to the same concern: can WWE’s current system actually produce wrestlers who can think on their feet when a match gets shaky, or are too many of them just following the plan and hoping nothing goes wrong?
“Have you really cultivated a pipeline to give these people enough knowledge and self-awareness to ad-lib, to call audibles? I don’t think there’s any audibles outside of the main event, do you? And even then, they’re very limited.”
Jade and Tiffany are both clearly important to WWE’s future, but Richards’ warning is pretty simple. If WWE keeps pushing young or inexperienced talent into big spots without enough ring generals around them, one sloppy moment can turn into something much worse.
Do you agree with Stevie Richards that WWE’s developmental system is creating a “blind leading the blind” problem, or was Jade Cargill’s rough Black Hole Slam just one bad spot? Let us know in the comments below.
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