Feature: Nick Takes an In Depth Look at the New ECW

For what seems like the 100th time in WWE brand history, ECW now has a new face that debuted this past Tuesday night on the broadcast, and the talent initiative, headed by General Manager Tiffany, is underway in a drastic fashion.

This week, the "land of extreme" introduced us to 4 new talents and promised that the talent initiative would continue within the coming weeks as new talent is called up from Florida Championship Wrestling for TV time on Tuesday nights. While I agree in general that WWE is making the right move in continuing the new talent initiative, they have to be careful that they are booking it correctly so that everyone involved has a fair shot to impress management and the viewing audience.

Let’s face it, ECW is not ECW, but that’s not news to anyone so the concept of using the brand as a training ground for new superstars is not only smart, it does have a decent history of working. Two current WWE Champions were established in ECW and continue to have success on their respective brands. CM Punk is the current World Heavyweight Champion and Kofi Kingston is the current United States Champion, and both talents established a connection with the live crowd on Tuesday nights. Evan Bourne and Jack Swagger are two young talents with tremendous potential that just made their debuts on Raw, so the new talent initiative on ECW is practical and I’d go so far as to say necessary.

But WWE can’t make the mistake of introducing the viewers to an abundance of wrestlers all at one time. They need to spread the talent out a bit over the course of several weeks, so that each wrestler has an opportunity to make a serious impression, bad or good, on WWE and its Universe. I felt like this past week’s show tried too hard to cram both the new stars and the veterans into a one hour show, which is actually only about 50 minutes long with commercial breaks. The new guys, with the exception of Sheamus, didn’t have much of an opportunity to connect with the crowd, which would be okay with me as long as I knew that these guys would be given time to prove themselves. But that’s not always the case with WWE. Management seems to sour very quickly on new talent in WWE, and sometimes wrestlers aren’t even given a second week to work if they don’t immediately impress during their first week. So I hope management realizes that if they’re going to cram a lot of talent into one show, they’re going to have to be willing to allow these guys to work for several weeks before they decide whether or not they want to keep them on the main roster.