WWE Planning For More NXT To Be More “Unpredictable”
A new report has details on how WWE plans to have more interactions between Raw & Smackdown superstars on NXT and vice versa.
Over the past few months, we have seen some WWE main roster stars appearing on NXT programming more often. Some of them have been “free agents” like veteran superstars such as Baron Corbin, Mustafa Ali and Dana Brooke.
In addition to that, Seth “Freakin” Rollins defended the WWE World Heavyweight Title on the June 20th episode of NXT against Bron Breakker. Rollins won the match that was considered by many people to be one of the best NXT matches on television in a long time. In addition to that, the NXT episode with Rollins against Breakker drew the best ratings for WWE’s Tuesday night show in over three years.
On the June 27th episode of NXT, Carmelo Hayes successfully defended the NXT Championship against Baron Corbin on the second week of the brand’s “Gold Rush” episodes featuring multiple championship matches in back to back weeks to television.
Carmelo Hayes also appeared on the June 26th episode of Raw to support his buddy Rollins. That led to Hayes losing to Finn Balor in a match on Raw (Carmelo’s title wasn’t on the line), which a lot of fans didn’t like.
The Wrestling Observer Newsletter’s Dave Meltzer has provided some insight into what WWE has planned for NXT with more Raw & Smackdown talent appearing as well as NXT stars on the main roster shows.
“The plan right now is to have more NXT talent on Raw and Smackdown and more main roster talent on NXT, both of which has become notable the last few weeks. The idea is to try and get the larger audience more familiar with the NXT talent from appearing on the big shows (the use of Carmelo Hayes this week is not the best way to do that because it gave exposure to tell everyone their champion is not a big star in the big scheme of things) and to use the main roster talent to build NXT ratings.”
“The idea is to make NXT more unpredictable with the idea of who may show up and also use talent that they aren’t doing anything with on the main roster to appear regularly in NXT. The goal, as Nick Khan had said, is to make NXT a third brand and they were very encouraged by last week’s ratings. There is talk of taping television outside of Orlando and running house shows outside of Florida but in smaller venues like NXT did when it toured before the pandemic.”
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