10 Times WWE Pressed The Panic Button
9. Everything Changes
It took exactly seven days for one match to be considered so rancid that an entire strategy for WWE's use of their new WCW property was completely rejigged to feature McMahon family members more prominently than ever before.
Booker T and Buff Bagwell weren't even the ones to blame for their catastrophic main event a week prior, just the two that happened be out there as an experiment profoundly failed. Their match was objectively dull but not inoffensively so. The crowd were simply ticked off that their WWE show had been handed over to a brand they'd been trained to hate with pavlovian precision - a problem McMahon had effectively created for himself with years of business-related burials.
The reboot involved retooling people already on McMahon's employ - former ECW wrestlers returned to their roots alongside Paul Heyman and Stephanie McMahon, revealing a plot alongside 'Shane-O-Mac's WCW refugee roster to forge a supergroup strong enough to challenge Vince's literal and figurative acolytes.
It was a noble and legitimately shocking hard reset, but it was symptomatic of wider problems at the time - the entire plan was unveiled within a single episode of Raw. The quickest of fixes drew one of the organisation's highest ever B-show pay-per-view buyrates a month later, but a Stone Cold Steve Austin swerve turn was another panicked effort to keep the story alive.