10 Biggest Mistakes Of WWE's New Era Thus Far
8. Creating A Huge Roster Imbalance
The 2016 WWE Draft was an excellent opportunity for their company to re-align their talent in a way that avoided main event logjams and afforded new opportunities to underused talent. WWE had the chance to spread their main eventers and midcarders equally across Raw and SmackDown to create two distinct, balanced talented trees for the first time in years, and their failure to do so will go down as one of the 2016 Brand Split’s greatest failures.
Raw’s main event scene is in tumult. Rollins and Reigns are operating under the wrong alignment, while the newly-elevated Finn Balor has become the brand’s top babyface by default. Only Sami Zayn can come close to rivalling his popularity among full-timers, and that’s a real problem. Fans just don’t have enough good guys to cheer at the top of the card, and if Raw is to create compelling main event storylines in the long-term, this requires immediate attention.
SmackDown, meanwhile, is crammed with main eventers like AJ Styles, Dean Ambrose, John Cena, and Randy Orton, but there’s very little beneath that. The company treated The Miz, one of their biggest stars, like complete dirt on SmackDown, and the likes of Kane, The Big Show, and Alberto Del Rio have fallen so far from grace that they’re barely afterthoughts at this point. In the midcard, you’ve got Kalisto, Apollo Crews, and Baron Corbin, and the rest are flotsam.
Both rosters are imbalanced in completely different ways. Raw’s saving grace is that their roster is populated by most of the company’s top-level in-ring performers, but the tiers are a mess. At this stage, WWE’s Draft has only hurt their roster balance.