WWE Hall of Famer and former WCW President Eric Bischoff took to an episode of his Strictly Business podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including Roxanne Perez and Asuka facing each other in the opening match of NXT and how Perez is the future star of the WWE.
Bischoff said, “But I love the first women’s match in NXT. Like that was tight. Those. Those women. We’re awesome. Well, I mean, Asuka’s a main-roster talent. She came down there for that. Roxanne Perez. She’s stellar, man. I mean, she’s going to be a star of the future for WWE. Kudos to Booker T [for training her]. There you go. And the team at the performance center because she’s tight. I don’t know how good she is with a mic in her hand. But yeah, for a developmental talent to be able to perform at that level under that pressure. She’s going places.”
Bischoff also talked about how he would have changed the opening segment of NXT with one-half of the reigning Undisputed WWE Tag Team Champions “The American Nightmare” Cody Rhodes.
“The Dynamite audience loves them. The WWE audience loves them. Guess what? They’re going to open up the show with Cody Rhodes. What do you think is going to happen? Of course, but it doesn’t matter. The point. In terms of the point I’m making, it did not sufficiently engage the audience to the extent that it served the purpose of building interest for the main event now. How could they have done that? I think I also have the same critique for WWE for NXT. I would have done a little differently. Okay. I would have opened that. That first segment would have been much harder. If I would have been on the team writing it. It would have been more than just verbiage. Okay. I would have had a conflict. I would have had physicality. That would be resolved in the main event, and I would have revisited that story at least once, if not twice, throughout the two-hour window. Just talking about it on the front end of the show and establishing that something is going to happen isn’t necessarily enough to sustain and increase a viewer’s desire to see what will happen at the end. You can’t just make the announcement and then hope people will show up at the end. You have to do something emotional. You have to do something that creates energy and interest. And what’s that word? Anticipation. And sometimes just making an announcement, whether it’s Christian Cage, talking about what’s going to happen tonight on Dynamite, or whether it’s Cody Rhodes, making a match is not sufficient to really build anticipation for a main event. So I think, and again, I’ll have to go back because I didn’t sit down and make notes. I watched the show like everybody else did. But I think for both of NXT, and I was a little NXT in particular, I was a little disappointed in the Cody Road segment. Cody does an amazing job. Cody Rose is in a class all of his own. Totally getting better by the minute. I agree. But It wasn’t enough to really make me want to stick around for the main event. Obviously, I did for other reasons, but it was a seven on what could have been a ten. In terms of what that segment should have and would have been designed to do. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it. But they left a lot of them on the table.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
