>>19728650Russo's entire run was a whiff.
I get what he was trying to do. WCW needed guys to be pushed up the midcard into the main event. It needed stars. Its success was built off the double whammy of being based around big names who were aging out coupled with the fact that the one talent they did push, Goldberg, sucked all the oxygen out of the room in a way where they couldn't get anyone else over. You can't build stars when it's guaranteed that other guys are going to beat them.
But Russo only worked well in WWF because he had a filter. A lot of his ideas were dogshit, and he leaned into an edginess that was a major turn-off to WCW fans who watched WCW instead of WWF precisely because the latter felt like garbage under Russo's tenure.
I loved WCW and I think it gets a bad rap based on WWE's rewriting of history. And I do think it might have survived if it hadn't been sold to Vince and that wrestling would be in a stronger position because WWF would have otherwise never had the market domination it ended up attaining.
But talk about mistake after mistake after mistake.