On the latest episode of the 83 Weeks Podcast, Eric Bischoff commented on the news of ROH taking a hiatus and stated he wasn’t surprised. The former WCW President said ROH being on syndication meant it was only a matter of time before they’d be off television.
“You can run infomercials and probably make more money than they were making running Ring of Honor in syndication,” Bischoff said. “It is what it is, it’s all about economics when you get to the point where the money is not there and there’s no vision, they’ve probably thought and tried. I don’t know, maybe not because I don’t know anything about it but syndication is a tough way to make a living in today’s business. Nobody was thinking about growing that business and having a combination of syndication and cable which is what WCW and WWE did for a long time.
“They had both syndication and cable as a means to generate revenue but all of that takes investment and money and if there was no investment, no vision, I’m not surprised at all [to hear the news]. You hang on until you don’t and then you’re gone and apparently that’s what’s happened. I can’t imagine how much Ring of Honor was making from syndicated broadcasting.”
ROH star Shane Taylor said the news of the company’s upcoming hiatus was surprising but not shocking. Bischoff continued to talk about the talent pool in ROH and why he doesn’t see many superstars ending up in AEW or WWE.
“There’s a lot of talent out there,” Bischoff mentioned. “Who knows where WWE is at, I don’t know what is going on there. There is still talent cutting from what I’ve heard, will be, could be soon. AEW has got a fair amount of talent. How much talent can they absorb before the talent starts going, wait a minute, I’m really happy I’ve got a job. I’ve went through this and lived through that, but you’re going to sign all this talent because you have all these big plans and then when that talent isn’t getting the TV time they had hoped for and the opportunities they had hoped for, it gets a little gnarly managing that talent. Tony’s got enough talent right now, I can’t imagine he’s going to go oh wow, there’s a lot of Ring of Honor guys, I can bring in six or eight more guys. WWE doesn’t apparently feel like they need anymore talent, they’re cutting talent.
“It’s almost like there’s a flood of wrestling talent all of a sudden isn’t there? Between the talent that WWE has cut that has migrated over to AEW, now Ring of Honor is going away floating around out there. There’s a lot of talent and not a lot of places to work and make a good living. One where you can actually go out and buy a house and know that you’ll be able to make your house payments on a regular basis and not just living off the indy circuit. Granted I know some guys that have done really well from the indy circuit that buy their houses cash, I understand that. For the other 95% of people and talent out there working indies, that’s not the case. Now there’s no places to work, AEW and WWE, they’re both pretty full on talent. I wouldn’t want to be a young talent looking for work right now, if I really needed a gig.”
