10 Ridiculously Ambitious WWE Ideas That Failed Horribly
3. Developmental
What's sad about Developmental, pre-NXT, is that it barely warrants inclusion as "ridiculously ambitious" even though, nominally, it sought to safeguard the very future of the company. It was ridiculous in how ambitious WWE was through being so unambitious, so it pretty much counts. It also acts as a neat segue to plug a book I wrote just in time for the holidays.
The synopsis of which:
While experimenting with an informal, years-long feeder association with Memphis, the WWF stumbled into a ridiculously stacked generation of talent and trained them in a dusty warehouse. Or rather, Jim Ross meticulously found them, with his ingenious scouting acumen. Then, sensing it still wasn't enough - The Rock, Kurt Angle et al. probably weren't going to wrestle forever - Ross and Jim Cornette lobbied (yes, they had to convince the WWF to nurture their own talent years after the death of the fruitful territory system) to instal the established OVW as a feeder league.
The Rock, Kurt Angle et al. did have to wrestle forever, because new Talent Relations exec John Laurinaitis botched the entire thing by virtue of being a useless, birdbrained yes-man, p*ssing Jim Cornette off into oblivion, buying magic beans from the most inexperienced of carnies, and only bothering to wholesale borrow Cornette's brilliant but myopic vision to laughably diminished returns.
WWE thought, in their complete arrogance, that they could simply sign Inexperienced Jacked Guy X, train him up, and make him into a household name.
It was f*cking ambitious, alright.