18 Ups & 15 Downs For WWE In 2023

10. NXT Call-Ups

Alba Fyre Isla Dawn
WWE.com

NXT Women’s Champion Indi Hartwell. NXT Women’s Tag Team Champions Alba Fyre and Isla Dawn. Cameron Grimes. Odyssey Jones.

Sure, WWE can tout several success stories about their call-ups from developmental this year, such as Dragon Lee, JD McDonagh, Zoey Stark and the Creed Brothers. But this spring’s WWE draft was a disaster for several NXT superstars who went from popular acts in Florida to little more than warm bodies, or altogether invisible on the main roster.

For all the talk about Triple H knowing exactly what to do with developmental wrestlers because he used to helm NXT, it was astonishing to see how many drafted superstars languished for months after being promoted. You can’t tout a booker’s “brilliance” without holding them accountable for disappointments.

Does this mean that the entire call-up system is broken and these wrestlers are ruined? Of course not. But this wasn’t a one-off problem in 2023, and WWE should be called to task for this.

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Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.