Eric Bischoff Talks About The 2019 WWE Draft Being A ‘Nightmare’

During his 83 Weeks podcast, Eric Bischoff reflected on his job as Smackdown Executive Director and here are the highlights…

His role: “The positions of executive director of RAW and Smackdown were brand new positions. I think they had been thought through very well on paper, but they hadn’t been executed or integrated into an actual process. There wasn’t really clarity on what that position was. I think there was some fuzziness or fog in regard to clarity for the position.”

“Paul [Heyman] didn’t have any more creative control than I did. The only person there who had creative influence was Vince McMahon. Everybody else’s job was to come to the table with ideas and then Vince would pretty much take them from there. I had as much access to Vince as I wanted to have.”

First Smackdown on FOX: “A lot of excitement, a lot of chaos. Anytime you’re doing a live show, in WWE especially, there’s a lot of last minute changes and modifications. You’re constantly dealing with variables or changes, some minor, some radical, some you have time for and some you’re fixing literally on the fly. There’s always this sense of controlled chaos at a big event like this premier was… We were still trying to navigate roster splits. I’ve never been through something like that in my life, just hundreds of hours of my life that I’ll never get back. It was tough.”

The 2019 WWE Draft: “That was just a freaking nightmare right up until the final moments we went on air. It was constant second guessing, back and forth, last minute changes. It was just brutal. I’m watching now and I know the draft is going on now and I’m thinking man, I haven’t heard from Bruce [Prichard] in a long time and I’m going to wait till after this is all over to reach out to him. This is just f***ing miserable if it’s the same as it was last year. I can tell you literally up until the day of the show none of us knew who was going where. Try writing T.V. that way, by the way.”

(quotes courtesy of WrestlingInc.com)