How Much Development Does It Really Take to Be a Dancing DJ?

What do John Cena, Randy Orton, Batista, Mr. Kennedy, Kurt Angle and Brock Lesnar have in common?

The answer: all came out of WWE Developmental and became almost instant successes as far as fan following and respect. That is true of a good majority of wrestlers who came out of developmental from 1999 to 2007. 

Every Tuesday, Friday, and Monday, I think to myself, “What is this show missing that we had a few years ago? Then, I go back to old tapes of former “C” show Velocity, and there, I find the answer.

We fans have very little to look forward to like we did back just a few years ago. Back in the day the talk of all the message boards, magazines and radio shows would be this up and coming wrestler coming out of WWE developmental or free agent coming in and how he’s going to be a future star and how we couldn’t wait till the WWE front office finally sees this persons potential.  

Here we are in 2009, the C show featuring the up and coming developmental guys is ECW on Sci-Fi and truly no one on that show has impressed anyone enough to make it a “much watch” show. That doesn’t stop the WWE from pushing Jack Swagger, Ricky Ortiz, and DJ Gabriel, but none of them give you the same feeling that Cena and Orton gave you when they made their debuts during Smackdowns original new talent initiative during the “ruthless aggression” era. 

The reason I bring this up is recently the WWE has released a number of developmental talents out of Florida Championship Wrestling along with guys that just haven’t been used and replaced them with a number of wrestlers out of their former developmental company Ohio Valley Wrestling.

OVW for those of you who don’t know is the company responsible for developing most of the WWE’s current roster all the way up to when they were replaced by FCW full time in February of 2008. FCW is the WWE’s second attempt to replace Ohio Valley, the first being the short lived Deep South Wrestling. I, for the life of me, can’t understand why you would replace a company that developed so many future Hall of Famers, including all the names above as OVW has for a gamble like they have with FCW.   

You knew what the OVW trainers had to offer and have seen results from them for years so what’s the problem? Now it looks like that decision is coming back to bite them as even the WWE themselves seem to be not convinced that replacing OVW was the right call.  Proof of that is they didn’t even make it an entire year after ceasing their affiliation with the company before going back, signing more developmental wrestlers from them and promoting them as the top place to learn the business of pro wrestling per a press release sent by WWE’s head of talent relations announcing the signings. 

Is that a comment you really should be making if your company also runs its own wrestling school with FCW?  If that’s not enough of a sign of WWE’s feelings toward FCW, now OVW’s website is promoting JBL will be making an appearance for the company at the end of the month. 

So, to me, the answer to the developmental letdowns and lack of roster depth is pretty easy. It’s time to send out another press release announcing that WWE developmental is heading back to Louisville, Kentucky. Ohio Valley Wrestling is the place the real stars of wrestling came from and is the place along with Shimmer that built what is TNA’s current knockout division including newest knockout Sojo Bolt (who was reportedly also being recruited with the crew who were signed to WWE developmental). 

Let the OVW staff have a go at this current batch of trainees and maybe we’ll have a roster full of future Mr. Kennedy’s, Cena’s and Orton’s again.  Things must be bad when you miss the days of the New Breed vs. ECW Originals feud on ECW.