10 Most Important Weeks In The Monday Night War

10. January 31st 2000 - The Radicalz Arrive In WWE

Eddie Guerrero, Perry Saturn, Dean Malenko and Chris Benoit were far from the last holdouts from WCW when Vince McMahon snapped all four of them up on the cusp of his single greatest commercial and creative year, but it was what each one of their signatures represented as much as what the Atlanta outfit was set to lose.

As WWE phased out the New Generation mantra in 1997, they placed similarly less emphasis on the in-ring product than ever before. They gained ground not with a loaded roster but by exploiting the very best out of almost everybody they had. The exact opposite was the case in a bloated WCW, resulting in Chris Jericho, half of of the cruiserweight division, and these four ultra-talented mechanics wondering why all the company's growth wasn't reflected in their own career.

Their symbolic guardrail hop on January 31st spoke volumes about how far apart the companies were becoming, the point where referring to the weekly competition as a "war" was itself fairly futile. The opposition offered Jeff Jarrett playing an authority figure and booking himself in a World Title match in something that already felt like a pathetic parody of the business' best ever years. We weren't to know it would foreshadow the bulk of the next five.