Eric Bischoff reveals unpopular decision he made to stop WCW making losses

Eric Bischoff was the man in charge of WCW. In that position, he had to make several unpopular decisions. During the recent episode of his 83 Weeks podcast (h/t Wrestling Inc), Bischoff talked about one of these decisions he had to make.

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Eric Bischoff reveals change he wanted to make in WCW

In 1993, Eric Bischoff replaced Bill Watts as the Executive Producer of WCW. Upon coming into that role, Eric Bischoff was handed a company that was going down the drain, with bad creative and strategy at its helm.

"WCW had been corkscrewing into the sewer for so long, that this was a crescendo of chaos. It was just as bad as it's ever been. It takes a year or more to turn things around, and unfortunately - or fortunately - this show was right in the middle of it. The creative sucked, the strategy sucked, everything about WCW was as bad as it could possibly have been."

"Now, there was talent but talent is a separate issue. There were some great things to talk about from a talent perspective, but from a branding and a marketing and creative perspective, this is about as low as it can be."

In this new position, Eric Bischoff found that one of the things that WCW was doing wrong was the house shows. The house shows saw the company lose a lot of money every time that they went out. When Eric Bischoff pointed this out, he became unpopular in the company. Bischoff wanted to shut down house shows for a time before restarting when their TV product was more popular and was more demanded.

"I am not a math guy. But even I would look at the numbers and go, 'wait a minute, if you go out 10 times and you lose $1000 each time you go out the door, then why does going out the door 25 times make that prospect anymore appealing?' They kept coming up with these plans to increase house shows and there was absolutely no logic to it whatsoever."

"It finally got to the point where I stood up and said, 'This is crazy; you guys are not thinking clearly. We should shut down our house shows and not even do another one. We'll do T.V. and we'll do pay per views, not do another house show until we build up some demand for the product.' That made me a really unpopular cat inside of the WCW offices with a number of people."

When Eric Bischoff came into that position, Tony Schiavone and Jim Ross were the favorites, but he was appointed as the Executive producer instead of them.