One of the biggest changes WWE made to its developmental system last year was putting a greater emphasis on former collegiate athletes over independent wrestlers and stars from other companies. Triple H, in a new intervie with The Athletic this week, explained one of the reasons why — “bad habits.” He explained, “The tryouts we did before, where there were a lot of athletes and experienced indie guys, I don’t think there’s any less of a ‘That’s a rock star.’ The indie stuff, half of it is, ‘He’s a good in-ring performer, but the rest is a mystery. He’s got bad habits I have to get him out of.’ This is almost cleaner. It’s a blank slate.”
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“The numbers force us to be more regimented,” he later added. “We used to be like, ‘Well, he’s only been here a year, let’s give him more time, see if he picks it up.’ Now we know there’s a six-month coming in the door of adapt, get rolling and then we’re looking at your aptitude for this. We know in that six months — and some won’t make it that long.”
Samoa Joe, who was helping WWE with its recruiting prior to his release in January, talked about the change during the Supercard of Honor post-show press conference, noting that AEW was signing up many of the top independent stars.
“You also have to understand the major shift was mainly because many of the better independent wrestlers are working for AEW,” Joe said. “Let’s just be honest here, when we were tapping into a market and looking for new athletes when I was with WWE at the time, when the markets tapped, you try to find a new market. That really was probably a lot of the appetence why they chose to switch directions so if there’s not a lot of gold in the well, you start digging somewhere else.”
“The Game” also addressed stars going to the young promotion during this week’s interview — “As far as the competition aspect goes, it’s great. It makes everybody sharper,” he said. “You get lazy if you’re all there is and everybody goes about their business. The end of the day, it’ll make us better, and we’ll all be better for it. All those things have forced us to be in a better place right now. Not that we wouldn’t have gotten there anyway, but we had to do it quicker in some manner. That’s an important piece of it, right?”
He added, “As long as there aren’t things hurting the business overall, I think any of that stuff is good. If you’re a 6-year-old kid, you turn on the TV, wrestling is on and you like it. Now you’re caught up in it. Then you start sampling all of it. You get to where you’re a huge fan. That’s the money. There’s room for everybody to do it. It’s like saying the USFL or XFL is starting up and the NFL is panicking about market share. It’s just going to increase people’s love for football. If you love football that much, you’ll watch all of the football, and it’s great. But the NFL is not sweating that.”
