WWE's creative team gets a lot of flack - and it's all deserved. The company has, potentially, the most talented roster in its history, and yet programming is boring and ratings are falling. With all of the amazing superstars WWE has under contract, it should be possible for the product to rival that from any era ever. Raw and Smackdown are filled with matches (and rematches) between amazing athletes and skilled competitors who have had no personality development and show no palpable motivation. Fans don't connect with the wrestlers, and that in turn, creates disinterest. There's little worse for a wrestling program - or, really, any form of entertainment - to be than uninteresting. So why is so much talent being underdeveloped? Internal politics are always a consideration - players like Daniel Bryan and Dolph Ziggler have intentionally been denied pushes they deserve - but the problems run deeper than that. In many cases, the reasons why wrestlers aren't getting over, drawing money, and bringing WWE into a new boom period is because of simple incompetence. In today's day and age, "WWE creative" is an oxymoron. Adding to the frustration is that, unlike in the old days, wrestlers aren't even encouraged to come up with their own characters or angles. It would seem, then, that there's no immediate solution - fans can only hope that inspiration strikes when it comes to these 12 stars:
Scott Fried is a Slammy Award-winning* writer living and working in New York City. He has been following/writing about professional wrestling for many years and is a graduate of Lance Storm's Storm Wrestling Academy. Follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/scottfried.
*Best Crowd of the Year, 2013
