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WHAT WOULD VINCE HAVE DONE, DOES ESPN HAVE BUYER’S REMORSE, ENDEAVOR CAN INTERFERE ALL IT WANTS AND MORE

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And, whatever became of Drake Maverick?

After retiring he joins WWE’s Creative team.

This isn't a knock on Triple H but do you think if Vince was still in charge (given his personality and clout) that the powers that be would have been able to impose their wishes on creative, or would be have been able to successfully push back? Also isn't this what Endeavor said that they wouldn't do after the purchase? That they wouldn't interfere with the running of WWE? And have you heard of them doing anything similar with the UFC? Or is that comparing apples and oranges?

If Vince were there and Ari Emanuel wanted Pat McAfee involved in the storyline, as the controlling owner, Pat would have been in the storyline.  If Vince didn’t like it, well he could take a walk.  I doubt that it would have come to that however.  As for Endeavor, they own the company and I took everything they said when they bought it with a grain if salt.

Was the WWE/ESPN deal a mistake? It's obvious that the ESPN Unlimited is not as successful as anyone had hoped, and now they're shoehorning McAfee into Cody/Orton at the last minute in the hopes of what, driving up subscriptions? Getting Pat McAfee's fans to tune in to Mania? Throwing ESPN a bone? I took Stephanie McMahon's advice and got a VPN to watch PPVs on Netflix, and it's worked great. And that one-year VPN subscription is cheaper than one month of Unlimited. I'd never sign up to a $30 a month service just for WWE when a much cheaper option is available, and I'm a paying fan who has attended Raw and Smackdown multiple times in the past couple of years.

From WWE’s standpoint?  No way it was a mistake.  It was a massive upgrade over what they were getting paid by Peacock.  TKO is all about generating as much revenue as possible and they got that with the ESPN deal.  Was it a mistake for ESPN?  I wonder that too.  Honestly, I never expected WWE to sell standalone subscriptions.  I don’t know if ESPN thought that it would but if so, I think that was a miscalculation.  I think that it definitely adds value to deals that they have with partners now, for sure, but when I look at YouTubeTV and see that they still haven’t integrated it yet, it tells me that Disney will be looking for more money for the ESPN properties when their current deals expire.

It befuddles me that they've managed to screw up Cody vs Orton, which should be as easy a lay-up as there is, because TKO made the mistake of running Mania in the same place two years in a row while bumping up prices 50%, and is now scrambling to sell tickets. And if ESPN can't get a bump in subscriptions from Wrestle-freaking-Mania without sticking one of their own on the show, then what was the point of spending over a billion dollars to put WWE on the App in the first place?

Keep in mind that they aren’t even a year in yet.  They are still finding their way.  But it does seem like ESPN doesn’t feel that they are driving the revenue that they expected from the deal.  I think we got a good view of that when they inserted the super long ad blocks into WrestleMania, even when they didn’t have ads to air in the slots.

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