10 Best Things About The 2002 WWE Brand Split

Competition is what drives success, and even if the 2002 brand split was artificial competition, it still drove effort up on both brands. Both on screen and off screen, from the writing teams to the wrestlers, everyone wanted to make sure their brand was the best. You could see that when Paul Heyman was leading the creative on Smackdown; he wanted it to be superior to Raw, and it ended up that way for a while.

The competition also made for some fun on screen competition between the brands. The Raw versus Smackdown narrative was a natural conflict, and it gave extra edge to classic battles like Raw's Shawn Michaels against Smackdown's Kurt Angle.