Rob Van Dam Explains If It Was Better To Be On Raw Or Smackdown

On a recent episode of his 1 Of A Kind podcast, WWE Hall Of Famer Rob Van Dam shared his opinion on if it was better to be on Raw or SmackDown during the earlier years of the WWE Draft.

The first WWE Draft or Brand Extension took place in 2002, where the WWE roster was split in two with half being exclusive to Raw and half to SmackDown. Rob Van Dam started as a Raw superstar, and then was drafted to SmackDown in 2004, and RVD felt for him that WWE’s flagship program was the best show to be on because it was live.

Well, Raw from the perspective of, that was always considered the A show. Smackdown was always considered to be the B show. You know, sometimes we’d do the Smackdown TV taping the very next day so it’d be like a Monday, Tuesday. The A-show would be live, then we would do Thursday’s show on Tuesday. That happened a lot. And then there’d be other times when we would do live on Thursday or whatever, we’d actually be doing Smackdown live but it was still always considered to be the B show.

Later in 2006, WWE expanded their roster to three brands with the addition of ECW, and Van Dam explained the issues with taping the show after SmackDown each week, especially early on when the separate ECW brand was created.

When ECW came out as a third brand, they piggybacked. So we would do Raw on Monday, and then Tuesday would be like an ECW/Smackdown show. Where first it’d be Smackdown, and they would somehow promote ECW as being the heels on their show. And then [they would] expect, after the show’s over, for all the fans to instantly turn into hardcore ECW fans even though they just made us get booed on their own show in front of the same people.

Rob Van Dam On Why He Was Hesitant To Sign With WWE

On a previous edition of his podcast WWE Hall of Famer Rob Van Dam explained why he was at first reluctant to sign with WWE in 2001 saying he was afraid that they would give him a lame character and change everything about him.

H/t to 411mania.com