10 Important Innovations WCW Made To The Wrestling Industry

4. Putting Major Matches On Television Regularly

If you're a regular WWE Network viewer and you watch old Monday Night Raw episodes from 1993, 1994 and 1995 you can see that WWE didn't follow the format of Raw that they have these days. They didn't load up Raw with midcard matches leading up to a major match at the end of the show. A typical episode of Raw in the early days featured a lot of squash matches where a superstar with a big name would beat a jobber rather easily. It was the format that WWE used on their weekend shows like Superstars for years. They didn't have a need to change it up. When WCW launched Nitro in 1995, the game changed. Since Nitro was putting on huge matches every week, WWE had to adjust. They couldn't rely on having squash matches anymore. It had to change and eventually it did. Thanks to WCW turning up the heat, they forced WWE to change how they were producing Raw and it led to a better product for both companies. In the end, the winners were the fans.