Why Triple H And Vince McMahon Are Destined For A Huge Fallout

If in the latter part of 2019 it was positioned as a legitimate third brand, through its storyline victory over RAW and SmackDown at Survivor Series, this was never a warm and grand celebration of its success but a cynical attempt to diminish the success of All Elite Wrestling. NXT remained a developmental system because with few rule-proving exceptions - AJ Styles, The Club, Mike Bennett - virtually every performer, no matter how well-honed, was dispatched to the Performance Center to learn the "playbook". But McMahon never grasped that NXT was doing the work for him, if in fact instructing awesome talents how to perfect a signature, camera-friendly pose constitutes as "work".

NXT was never an effective, fit-for-purpose developmental system in any of its various "eras". The very purpose - reading pro wrestlers for Vince McMahon's main roster - was untenable. It used to be as outstanding as it was feel-good, but even then, what was Vince McMahon going to do with a Sami Zayn other than interpret his heart-on-sleeve babyface act as the work of a pale geek? What was Vince going to do with Triple H's incredible southern style tag reboot? He doesn't give a sh*t about tag team wrestling!

Vince McMahon didn't like the universally beloved WWE NXT at its seminal peak. He was hardly going to do anything with the stars of Pro Wrestling Guerrilla.

Triple H's vision was sound. He was savvy enough to have grasped the paradigm shift in the early 2010s, and he attempted to subsume the super-indie trend in a bid to reimagine WWE as a one-stop shop. He was doing Vince a favour. He was attempting to quell a grassroots movement and babyface the heel company in the process, and it worked. For a while. The issue is that, while he recruited the personnel of the high-end independent circuit, WWE was constitutionally unwilling to fold in its organic, extemporaneous spirit, with which Being The Elite led to the formation of AEW.

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