News broke a few days ago that WWE is putting Eric Bischoff in charge of Smackdown Live. He and Paul Heyman were both named ‘Executive Directors’ by WWE.
On his 83 weeks podcast, Bischoff opened up about his new position with WWE.
Here is what he said (h/t to Fightful for the quotes below):
“First of all, I wanna say thank you. I’m overwhelmed with the support, the positive response that I got on social media after WWE made the announcement that I’ll be joining the team and getting involved with SmackDown. The amount of response[s] I got — I knew it was gonna be a good response, I knew it’d probably be a lot, but I was absolutely overwhelmed by the nature of that response and how positive it was and just the sheer volume of it all. I think people are really excited.
I wanna let everybody know, the magnitude of this opportunity, the challenge and commitment that goes along with it, is not lost on me. There’s been a couple times over the last few days where I’ve been driving my truck or taking my dog on a hike and going, ‘Wow, this may be…’ it’s not maybe, this is the biggest opportunity I’ve ever had in this industry, granted, when Bill Shaw made me President of WCW. Obviously, that was a very big moment, but I was learning on the job there. I had nothing to lose there. I was taking a company in WCW that had never turned a dollar a profit, that was just a number two to WWF at that time that we weren’t really even number two. A company that was fraught with bad history and internal issues, so I had nothing to lose, and in this situation, this is an entirely different ballgame here. This is a very sophisticated company. In WWE, there is a great team already in place. They are moving their SmackDown show to FOX network which is obviously gonna have a lot of eyeballs on it in every way. So the magnitude of the opportunity is not lost on me but I said this in a tweet — this is probably the only thing I’m really gonna say beyond this, and I mean this, almost a tear in my eye saying it: I’m honored, I’m humbled and I cannot express, even here, because this is a different kind of excitement for me. I haven’t felt this way, maybe in forever but at least twenty years. This is a whole different ballgame.”
Let me know what you think in the comment section below.
On a related note, check out the 5 things that Bischoff and Heyman need to do now that they are in charge.