10 Milestones of WWE's long road of decline

This week's chaotic edition of Raw, which some fans are already putting into the conversation as one of the worst ever, should serve as yet more evidence that Vince McMahon is losing his marbles and that it's time for him to go. In many ways, this week's chaos was the visible manifestation of WWE's decline from beetling heights into a bottomless pit of desperation and irrelevancy.

At the turn of the century, the company ruled the airwaves, with buzz oozing from its pores. When I was a 5th, 6th, and 7th grader, it was impossible to not watch Raw and SmackDown. You'd have nothing to talk about in school the next day. All the boys, and even many of the girls were talking about what Stone Cold Steve Austin was doing, what The Rock was doing, and so on. Yes, even at that age group, we were all watching.

That buzz is long gone. WWE is far from the minds of most kids in school these days, and we know this is true because the median age of the company's audience keeps going up every year. These problems, which have been built up for many years, are now cascading, and Vince McMahon seems incapable of dealing with them. The company has driven so far into the woods that its driver seems to not remember the way back.

Let's look at 10 milestones - 10 ominous signs, of how the company got so far off the right road. Only by seeing what went wrong since 2001 can we diagnose and medicate the patient.

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#1 The Invasion angle

Obviously, the road begins with the end of the Monday Night Wars. Vince McMahon was right to be gleeful, but the purchase of WCW opened a major opportunity for the then-WWF. The company was still getting a couple of million viewers a week even in 2001. Now, possibilities that fans had been dreaming about for years suddenly became open - Stone Cold vs. Goldberg, The Rock vs. Diamond Dallas Page, DX vs. the nWo, etc.

None of those possibilities came to fruition, and while that isn't entirely WWF/E's fault (many of the bigger names were signed directly to Time Warner and so chose to sit out their contracts), that shouldn't have been a fatal setback. Smartly-booked, the WWF and WCW superstars could have had a meaningful story.

Instead, the WCW stars were treated as jokes, and the story centered mostly around Stone Cold's heel turn, which had already been poorly-received even before the Invasion. For about six months, the two sides meandered in a "war" that aimlessly meandered from show to show until finally ending anticlimactically at Survivor Series.

The Invasion should have been a major step up for the company. Instead, it anticipated many of the creative problems plaguing it today, and was the moment WWF/E jumped the shark. It still had inertia from the Attitude Era, but the company has never gotten the same buzz it had from before the Invasion.

#2 The Rock Goes Hollywood

In 2002, "Austin took his ball and went home," and would need to retire only a month after returning due to mounting injuries. At the same time, The Rock, already having had a stint in Hollywood in 2001, began to become a part-time superstar in earnest. He had become such a big star that he was transcending wrestling, which was cleverly made into an angle when he came back in 2003. However, his return only lasted for a few months. His appearances would only be sporadic from that point onward, and from 2004, he was gone.

The loss of The Rock, who was still only in his early 30's, was certainly a blow for the company's future. In the short-term, it made for a power vacuum which will lead us directly into the next milestone on our tour of WWE's two lost decades, but in the longer term, it was even more devastating.

The Rock's departure for Hollywood seems to have changed something in Vince McMahon. He saw that one of his stars was getting bigger than his company, and while this realization would take about a decade to be fully felt, it has been an albatross on modern booking.

#3 Triple H's Reign of Terror

From this moment until WrestleMania 21, Triple H ruled Monday Night Raw with an iron fist, with only brief intermissions. On the one hand, this was understandable. Stone Cold Steve Austin had retired, The Rock had left, other big stars from the Attitude Era - The Undertaker, Kurt Angle, and so on, were on SmackDown.

And yet, those two and a half years signaled an unmistakable creative decline of the flagship show. SmackDown was easily the better of the two shows during this period, but as we intimately know, that show's ratings depend on how well Raw does.

On Monday nights, Triple H wasn't quite the same superstar that he was from 1999-2001, when he did his consensus career best work. He also no longer had babyfaces like The Rock and Austin to play off of.

The result was many lackluster angles (most infamously with Scott Steiner and Goldberg) as the company built up Randy Orton and Batista beneath Triple H's sway. Both of them would become big stars, even if Orton flopped after his initial turn on Evolution, but the damage had been done. This period marked the beginning of WWE's modern obsession with "heat," which has siphoned much excitement away from the programming, as there's so few people to cheer for.

#4 Brock Lesnar pursues new ventures

At WrestleMania 20, Brock Lesnar left WWE in the worst way possible after a terrible match with Goldberg. Those wrongs would be righted 13 years later, but the damage was done by his abrupt departure. The company had invested heavily in Lesnar since his debut in May of 2002, to the point that he beat The Rock for the Undisputed Championship three months later. Now, yet another star was walking out on Vince to try his hand elsewhere.

Brock Lesnar failed in the NFL, but succeeded in the UFC, becoming one of the company's biggest draws. So soon after his loss of The Rock, this must have rattled Vince McMahon, and sent him closer to the modern philosophy of "the brand being the draw," with a hesitance to let anyone get too popular to the point that they might leave the WWE. The result is today's palpable lack of star power. Only one true mega star would be made following Lesnar's departure, but he came with his own problems.

#5 The Super Cena Era and the Move to PG

Following his WWE Championship victory at WrestleMania 21, John Cena was positioned as the top star in the company. He had gotten over on his own in the early 2000s, and by 2005 was the most popular star, so the move made sense. On the one hand, WWE had finally found its next "guy." On the other, his push became the subject of controversy in ways that his predecessors had not been.

Cena's character, which initially started edgy and cool, became lamer as the years went on, and his prominence is intimately tied in with WWE's move to PG in the summer of 2008. Cena came to exemplify the PG philosophy, and while he had the charisma to pull it off well, the creative direction simply lacked the pop and realism seen in previous years.

Compare the above segment, with the infamous "JBL is poopy" line, to what we had seen in the Attitude and Ruthless Aggression eras. The shift to PG landed WWE some lucrative sponsorship deals, among other things, but it was undoubtedly a move that gave rise to creative plagues in the long term, shackling the programming with sterile, corporate content that drove old fans away and prevented new ones from coming in.

When Cena's time at the top was up, Vince McMahon went with Roman Reigns, who couldn't pull off the same act. With the combination of such sterile programming and a lead "guy" that couldn't sell it, WWE's creative and ratings declined, which had been more or less steady since 2001, accelerated.

#6 The Rock's Return

Obviously, this was a joyous moment. Seeing The Rock back in a ring after seven long years was a sight for sore eyes. People had dreamed for years of a match with Cena, and soon, we found out that it was going to happen. The result was the most buzz and relevance since 2001 and the most successful pay-per-view ever in WrestleMania 28.

Yet, for this brief return to glory, The Rock's comeback heralded yet more long-term problems in WWE's creative direction. After the success of this angle, Vince McMahon correctly understood that the part-time stars of yesteryear delivered more excitement than the ones he had under his employ all the time. The result was the beginning of the "part-timer" era, where those stars would routinely get the most shine and often humiliate their younger counterparts.

Over the years since 2011, the damage that this has done has only now manifested itself. Most of the part-time shots have been fired, and with low ammunition, it's evident that no one has stepped in their place.

Instead of using those part-time stars to pass torches and help build the future, WWE has in this decade sacrificed its present star power to aging legends. Now, no one has the same buzz, and the weekly programming lacks people to care about.

#7 Botching the Summer of Punk

The sad thing about the coming part-timer era was that mere months after The Rock's return, one of those full-time superstars set the wrestling world on fire in a way not seen in years. CM Punk's June 2011 "pipe bomb" got everyone talking. The angle leading into Money in the Bank 2011 was the best in years, and the match there was the main roster's consensus best of the decade.

It was all proving that there was still excitement to be found in the present roster, that the stars of today could still deliver huge buzz and relevance to the company. Then CM Punk came back and the angle was botched beyond belief with the presence of Triple H and Kevin Nash. CM Punk would soon go on to have a 434-day title reign, but he was positioned down the card even with the championship.

Going below John Cena vs. The Rock was one thing, but being below John Cena vs. John Laurinaitis beggars belief. Not for the first time in the decade, WWE had something white hot on their hands and squandered it. With its demise, WWE's star-making machine was belching and sputtering, clearly running out of gas.

#8 Raw Moves to 3 Hours

With Raw 1000, the Monday night flagship show permanently moved to a schedule of three hours. This brought in a boon of new revenue to the company with the extra commercial time, but the additional hour unmistakably accelerated Raw's decline in quality. Three hours is, put simply, too long for a weekly wrestling program. The bloated schedule has led to the need for more filler, meaningless content, which makes it easier for viewers to tune out rather than stay invested in the show.

It was yet another short-term gain for long-term pain. Even during the heights of the Attitude Era, an extra hour would have been much. In today's scripted, starless world, that extra hour is agony. It's no coincidence that the ratings decline accelerated in the years after 2012, when that extra hour was added.

Unfortunately, there's no getting out of this one...

#9 The Cult of Brock Lesnar

When Brock Lesnar returned in 2012, he actually didn't have much of a notable first couple of years, being bogged down in a feud with Triple H. Then he beat The Undertaker and broke his fabled WrestleMania streak in 2014. Since then, WWE has turned Lesnar into Ares, God of War.

His altar has lacked no share of victims, and as a result, Lesnar's cult has prevented anyone from getting over. This is, more than anything else, the direct cause of why WWE is so lacking in star power today.

For example, Braun Strowman got red hot in 2017 and was sacrificed to Brock Lesnar. Even Roman Reigns, the guy who was supposed to ultimately benefit from Lesnar's ascent into godhood, was sacrificed. Even Seth Rollins wasn't allowed to beat Lesnar cleanly at WrestleMania 35, but by that point, any benefit that could have been had from Brock Lesnar's ending Undertaker's streak was long gone.

It was a gigantic waste of five years, the very five years that the company began hemorrhaging, rather than merely losing, viewers.

#10 Burying the Women's Revolution

A month after main eventing WrestleMania, and it feels like it hasn't mattered at all. The women's division is as unexciting as it's been in a long time and has been on a downward spiral since the Royal Rumble, with a horrendous build to the WrestleMania main event. The reign of "Becky two Belts" has already been abysmal, with Lynch saddled with a green Lacey Evans and yet another match with Charlotte Flair.

The aforementioned Flair's booking is a key component in why the division feels like it's so thin. Much like Lesnar, her booking has been a ceiling on many potential stars, with the popular Sasha Banks and Asuka being sacrificed on her altar. Even Becky Lynch only got to where she is by being too over to ignore. It was by no means WWE's original plan.

Elsewhere, other stars, like Bayley, were sacrificed to Alexa Bliss, Vince McMahon's other blonde favorite, and never recovered. Bliss herself didn't create an exciting division, either, and has been aimless since finally falling from the top at SummerSlam last year, not giving back what she took.

Let's not even get started on the mess with the newly-introduced Women's Tag Team Titles. The result is a thoroughly unexciting division as we get deep into 2019, with apathy fast setting in. Most of it was buried for two people, and those two people are now stale. All this after an unnecessary, unexciting WrestleMania angle that was a proven ratings killer.

The women had the potential for great growth beginning in 2015, but WWE has, with rapid speed, normalized them, making them just as stale as the rest of the product, even now, at a time when the division should be hitting new heights.

Now that the company's ability to gain friendly PR with them has seemed to run out, it appears they've gone back to not caring at all, so why should we? It's a microcosm of everything that's gone wrong in these two lost decades.