12 Ups And 15 Downs For WWE In 2016

2. Brand Extension 2.0

There clearly are some benefits to having two distinctive rosters. For example, we have AJ Styles and Kevin Owens as main event champions.

But this year’s brand split was not some carefully calculated decision that was made in the best interest of the product. USA Network wanted SmackDown to have a more prominent program, so this is what we got. And while it’s been cool to have Styles and Owens, Becky Lynch and Sasha Banks, and New Day and the Wyatt Family as simultaneous champions, it has produced some problems.

For starters, if you want to follow all of WWE’s storylines and programming, you have to sift through five hours of Raw and SmackDown each week, with an extra two to three hours every couple weeks for PPVs (including the brand-specific events). Add another hour if you want to keep up with the cruiserweights on 205 Live. That’s a lot of television, even if you DVR it and skip the commercials.

You also have watered-down rosters, which is really evident in the tag and women’s divisions, where there are only about six competitors/teams in each division. So rather than having a robust 10-12 person women’s division, you have two six-woman rosters, meaning you can cycle through challengers in just a couple months.

There are ways this new brand extension can work, and it has some benefits. But overall, we’ve seen how WWE ran a brand split before, and it didn’t end well. So until the company continuously proves us (and history) wrong, this will remain as a very big negative based on potential alone.