20 Days That Changed WWE Forever
6. 25 March 2002 - The Brand Split
Not long after the Invasion storyline ended and the WCW brand was killed for good, Vince McMahon realized he had a problem. Yes, it was a satisfying ego stroke to buy WCW just to drag it through the mud, but he now had too many stars on his roster and, to be honest, competition had been pretty good for business. In order to solve both of those problems, he'd turn the WWF into two separate promotions - Raw and SmackDown.
On the 25 March 2002 episode of Raw, McMahon and Ric Flair (who in storyline was a 50% owner of the WWF) convened to draft the top superstars of the company into two separate rosters. McMahon, who gained ownership of SmackDown, started out with The Rock. Flair took The Undertaker as the first pick for Raw. Over the course of the next two hours, each man took nine more superstars or units, with the rest of the rosters decided "randomly" and announced online.
It was all theatrical, of course, and there was no real competition, but the roster split was a very real change to the structure of the company. Before long, there were two sets of titles, split-brand PPVs, and very little interaction between Raw and SmackDown stars. The original split lasted until 2011, but a new one was instituted last year.