10 Things WWE Are Secretly Telling Fans About Their Future
3. Open Challenge?
Necessity has been the mother of invention for WWE over the past several years.
A torrid run as WWE's talent doyen saw John Laurinaitis on the outs after years of poor work in the field. Ostensibly working under the remit of Vince McMahon but overseeing very little good work at all, he of cack-hand and croaky voice was booted as Vince's favourite McMahon-in-law seized control. Based on the wrestlers escaping FCW, it couldn't come soon enough.
They'd have been easily classified as vanilla if they weren't all so tanned. Because they all were. That's if they even made it to the main roster for longer than a few weeks, or at all. Florida Championship Wrestling was depressingly bleak, but the original NXT and/or a main roster run-out wasn't exactly a Wizard Of Oz-style burst of colour.
Triple H identified not just a need to develop from within, but a better relationship with companies WWE could potentially poach from. Both have - in broad terms - proffered success stories ever since, but it remains to be seen if the company will stick with the philosophy when they've finished strip-mining the best of the rest.
What Hunter managed in the 2010s was a cleaner take on McMahon's bullish tear through the 1980s territories. There's every chance he tires of that just as "DADDDDD-UH" did too.