IMPACT Wrestling is one of the stand out shows of 2020. The storylines and the characters have really helped develop excellent in-ring segments. In a recent 83 Weeks segment, Eric Bischoff discussed why TNA failed and compares it to the current NXT product.
TNA at its peak was one of the best companies and seemed like a genuine future competition to WWE. The company would bring both Eric Bischoff and Hulk Hogan in 2010 in order to help with the wrestling side of things. Dixie Carter had all the money, but none of the knowledge of the business. Thanks to Bischoff, the company would introduce the storylines behind Aces and Eights and would eventually make Bully Ray their champion.
Bischoff stated,
“I don’t think NXT is as good as TNA was when TNA was at its peak. Now ‘at its peak’ is subjective, right? Some people liked TNA when it first started because it was new. I get that. There’s value in that. There’s a valuation you can apply to that fact,” Bischoff said. “A lot of people liked it because it did feel different in the very beginning. Some people liked that smaller presentation. More than anything, everybody loves a competitor. Right, because you get your hopes up and you start getting interested in some new, fresh characters that you hadn’t seen before.”
“But if you go back and look at TNA in terms of its peak across the boards, not for a moment in time, but for an extended period of time across the boards in terms of television ratings, pay-per-view buys and house show attendance. And that’s going to be that period of time that I was describing earlier, right around the Aces and Eights peak storyline period with Brooke [Hogan] and Bully [Ray] and all of that when they were putting 2500, 3500, 5000 people in a venue. Yes, they did, and they actually paid for it. I don’t know that NXT is doing anything better than TNA was when TNA was at its peak. I would be pretty sure, if I was a betting man, that I would bet that there are a lot more resources being pumped into NXT than there ever were being pumped into TNA.”
Bischoff recently had a short stint on Smackdown as head producer before Bruce Prichard would take the reigns on both shows.
You can find me on Twitter @fazzasthoughts
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