WCW: 6 Innovations Eric Bischoff Did To Change Wrestling

1. The Creation Of WCW Monday Nitro

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfObFdpnv3Q When talking about WCW Monday Nitro, it's important to remember how ballsy it was for WCW to try to compete with WWE by going with Monday night show. WWE's Monday Night Raw started in 1993 and WCW felt like the only way to compete with them was to go head to head with Nitro, which began on September 4, 1995. The appeal of Nitro, which aired Monday nights on TNT, was that it was live every week. One of the things Bischoff did as WCW President was to give away the results of Raw when the show was taped. It was an unheard of move to acknowledge the competitor and to also give away results on your show. The idea was that if fans knew what was going to happen on Raw then they would be more inclined to stay on Nitro. It worked while Nitro was a hot show and Raw was good, but once Raw became better it backfired like when Mick Foley won the WWE Title in January of 1999. As mentioned previously, once the NWO angle hit and Nitro gained steam it crushed WWE in the ratings for about two years once Hall & Nash showed up in the spring of 1996. They had the live show every week and the product that the fans wanted to see. Remember also that Raw didn't go live every single week (with some exceptions) until WWE started Smackdown in 1999. Nitro was almost always live. That gave them an advantage. Bischoff was the guy that really pushed for it because he knew that without the live show every week it wouldn't have been different. Nitro being live made it stand out. That was the appeal to a lot of people. Where did it all go wrong? Nitro went from a two hour show to three hours. That was just too much. At the same time, they were doing two hours of Thunder every week too. It was just too much WCW. They didn't know how to limit themselves. A lot of those same things can be said about WWE today considering how many hours of TV they have, but the difference is WWE is without a true competitor. When WCW made the mistakes, it hurt them because fans would watch WWE. If WWE makes a mistake it doesn't hurt them due to the lack of competition. Bischoff pushing for Nitro as a live show up against Raw changed the wrestling business. It gave WWE some serious competition, it showed that somebody could beat them (for about two years anyway) and without his influence it's hard to know if there would have even been the "Monday Night War" that fans have come to know over the years. Eric Bischoff's greatest innovation on the wrestling business was definitely the creation of Nitro. It changed the business for the better. No doubt about it.