SmackDown vs. Raw…Again Part 1

In 2001, World Wrestling Entertainment had established itself as the undisputed wrestling promotion champion in the world. It had defeated Extreme Championship Wrestling and squeezed the life out of World Championship Wrestling, putting an end to the epic “Monday Night Wars.”

As the dust settled and the smoke cleared, many former ECW and WCW wrestlers signed with WWE, creating a huge surge in talent on the WWE roster. In order to give these new wrestlers airtime while keeping the established WWE stars on television, WWE came up with the brand extension. The idea was to make Raw and SmackDown two separate promotions that would “compete” against each other. There was a draft between Raw and SmackDown and wrestlers were exclusive to only the show that drafted them. The only exceptions were champions who appeared on both shows. The only times fans saw wrestlers from both Raw and SmackDown appear on the same show were pay-per-views.

Eventually, champions became exclusive to either Raw or SmackDown with each brand having a total of four titles each. For midcard  championships, this was not really a problem as Raw had the Intercontinental Championship and SmackDown had the United States Championship. There was also a Cruiserweight division with its own title that was exclusive to the SmackDown brand. However, each show had its own world champion, pair of tag team champions, and eventually a women’s champion as SmackDown retired the Cruiserweight Championship and created the Divas Championship while Raw already had the Women’s Championship

The brand extension continued until 2011 when SmackDown wrestlers began to appear regularly on Raw. It was officially phased out by 2012, and titles merged as the Raw and SmackDown tag team titles and women’s titles were unified. The unification process was complete in 2013 as the WWE Championship of Raw and the World Heavyweight Championship of SmackDown were merged by Randy Orton when he defeated John Cena and became the first Undisputed WWE World Heavyweight Champion since 2002. With that, the brand extension had officially come to an end.

Wrestlers were no longer exclusive to certain shows, titles could be defended on both Raw and SmackDown, and the championships regained their prestige as there were fewer belts to compete for between the wrestlers. It was nice to have the WWE go back to a simpler way, and I was and still am a fan of ending the brand extension.

In theory, the brand extension was a good idea, but in reality, it failed. While it did allow a few wrestlers to emerge like John Cena, Batista, and Randy Orton, it ultimately turned SmackDown into the “B” show as more attention was given to Raw each and every week. SmackDown did have great success and was an overall better show than Raw when the brand extension began, however it slowly spiraled downward and essentially became a recap of Raw with some filler. If it was executed better, then perhaps the brand extension could have worked. Maybe there could have been more than a handful of guys who had careers launched during the brand extension, and Raw and SmackDown could have been treated as equal shows. That was not the case, and I do not really see that happening with the new brand extension.

Stayed tuned for part two of this post in which I explain why I do not like WWE’s choice to bring back the brand extension.