Watch: Eric Bischoff Discusses His Mindset Heading Into His New SmackDown Live Role

On a recent episode of the After 83 Weeks show with Eric Bischoff and Christy Olson, the new executive director of SmackDown Live was asked a few questions about his new position on the Blue Brand’s creative team.

At one point Bischoff was asked if he’s looking to redeem himself for his past mistakes with this new role.

“What can I do to meet and exceed everybody’s expectations, that’s really the way I look at it,” Bischoff said. “I’m really not looking at it within the context of anything else that’s ever happened before.”

While the former WCW executive producer was behind major successes in WCW like the New World Order and Goldberg’s undefeated streak, he was also involved in some of the company’s weakest storylines and characters in 1999-2000.

Bischoff was also asked if he’d be present for the Extreme Rules pay-per-view on Sunday in Philadelphia. He clarified that he’ll still be in the process of moving from Cody, Wyoming, to Stamford, Connecticut. He posted a photo on Thursday showing that he was setting the route for the move.

While Paul Heyman has reportedly already been involved backstage as the executive director for Raw, Bischoff has not officially started his job over on SmackDown. He is reportedly not expected to play an on-camera role on the show, though given the nature of wrestling that could change at any time.

When WWE first announced the Heyman and Bischoff hirings, the company described their new roles as “Heyman and Bischoff will oversee the creative development of WWE’s flagship programming and ensure integration across all platforms and lines of business. The creation of these roles further establishes WWE’s ability to continuously reinvent its global brand while providing two distinct creative processes for its flagship shows.”

In his first episode of the 83 Weeks podcast after the announcement, Bischoff said his new position was a bigger opportunity for him than being president of WCW.

“The magnitude of this opportunity and the challenge and the commitment that goes along with it is not lost on me,” he said. “There’s been a couple of times over the last few days where I’ve been driving around in my truck or taking my dog for a hike and going, ‘Wow!’

“It’s not maybe, this is the biggest opportunity I’ve ever had in this industry,” he continued. “Granted when Bill Shaw made me president of WCW, obviously that was a very, very big moment. But I was learning on the job there. I had nothing to lose there. I was taking a company in WCW that had never turned a dollar of profit, that was such a distant number two to WWF at that time that we weren’t even really number two, a company that was fraught with a bad history and all kinds of internal issues. So I had nothing to lose. In this situation, this is an entirely different ballgame here.”