Thursday, March 28, 2024
EditorialJack Swagger's Release from WWE: Who is to Blame?

Jack Swagger’s Release from WWE: Who is to Blame?

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One of the bigger stories over the past week that has been somewhat brushed aside due to Fastlane and WrestleMania was the release (or lack thereof) regarding Jack Swagger.

We don’t know the full ins and outs of the situation, but what it seems to boil down to is Swagger requesting to be let out of his contract so he can go elsewhere, as he was just sitting at home and felt as though he wasn’t being properly utilized. Although WWE officials have not spoken much on the subject, it would appear they feel like he’s not worth the time to invest in, yet they clearly don’t want to just let him go and will be dragging this out as long as possible to prevent him from wrestling in other venues.

Why is that the case? If he’s not valuable, who cares if he pops up on Impact or ROH or Lucha Underground? If he is, why has he been sitting on the sidelines for so long? It can’t be both at the same time.

For that matter, who is to blame for why he’s in this position to begin with? He’s a veteran at this point and a former world champion, yet he’s leaving the company in a less than favorable fashion compared to others who have mutually parted ways and been welcomed back with open arms.

Is this an instance where he didn’t match up to WWE’s standards and it just took a long time for the guillotine to chop his head off, or is this an oversight on the company’s end?

But First, a Little Backstory…

Swagger came into ECW as a top prospect in September 2008 and by January 2009, he was already the champion of that brand, defeating Matt Hardy—a noteworthy conquest despite it not being the equivalent of ending Undertaker’s streak. He would lose the title to Christian in April 2009 and then transition to Raw, where he was a prominent midcarder. By April 2010, he was cashing in his Money in the Bank briefcase to win the World Heavyweight Championship from Chris Jericho.

That title reign didn’t work out that well, but he would go back to his midcard status, tagging with Dolph Ziggler and being managed by Vickie Guerrero. This was an interesting duo that could have held the tag titles, but that didn’t come to pass, although he would eventually win the United States Championship.

The next time he would get any real significant traction was when The Real Americans kicked off, which would see his next true push as a main eventer, but even then, it was half-assed. For those in attendance of WrestleMania 29 like myself, he didn’t even get a proper entrance during his title match against Alberto Del Rio and it felt like it was a dark match more than anything else. Not only did he come up short, but the very next night, he was overshadowed by Dolph Ziggler’s cash-in and world title win.

Essentially since that point onward, Jack Swagger’s done jack shit.

The Case for WWE’s Fault

We’ve seen this happen so, so many times in the past: WWE signs someone and pushes them to the moon for a couple of months only to get bored with them and move on to the next flavor. Since that person was skyrocketed from nowhere to the top very quickly, there’s no experience adjusting to the ups and downs of the business. Without having any context of how to navigate the roster’s hierarchy without the machine behind them, they get lost and struggle.

Some people subscribe to the mentality that you should throw someone in the deep end to see if they can swim. The problem with that, though, is they might drown and you have to take part of the responsibility. It isn’t all on them if you’re their teacher tasked with coaching them along the process.

If Swagger wasn’t ready for a world title victory and to be the headliner of SmackDown, WWE should have realized that and not given him the ball to run with in the first place. They’ve been in business longer than he’s been wrestling and they’re the authority here calling the shots. Sometimes, it’s worth a risk and it pays off, but other times, you just piss off fans who haven’t warmed up to him yet and you put all the weight on his shoulders to pass or fail while he’s still arguably learning the ropes.

Arguably the two best times Swagger has been the most entertaining was when he had a manager, as Vickie Guerrero and Zeb Colter helped offset his lack of personality. When they were taken away from him, WWE had to know it was a downgrade and that they weren’t giving him the proper tools to succeed.

His biggest weakness has always been a lack of character and instead of providing him with options to circumvent that, they left him to his own devices. When he’s been so inconsistently booked for such a long period of time, what is he able to really get over with the crowd? The only people who would be familiar with him would be those on Main Event and nobody watches that.

Rather soon after the draft, they must have come to the realization that they had no use for him on Raw and moved him over to SmackDown. It seemed for at least a week or two that he would be having a resurgence on the blue brand, but his feud with Baron Corbin was dropped very quickly and nothing else ever came about for him.

Why bother moving him if you had no plans? For that matter, how do you not have plans for someone who is a former world champion amongst other accolades?! He’s a wrestler’s wrestler—just put the guy out there and have him wrestle! You don’t even need a storyline most of the time!

Whether he was a heel or a babyface, there were plenty of people for him to lock up with that could have provided interesting bouts. To my recollection, he’s never had a match with Apollo Crews, either member of American Alpha, AJ Styles, or even maybe Dean Ambrose or Kalisto. All of those are just on SmackDown and there are still other choices on Raw to pick from, too.

Wrestlers are responsible to go out and perform their characters, wrestle for the crowd, and try to improve things as much as possible by getting over with the audience and bringing new things to the table, but there are so many cases of people not getting an opportunity to test things out or to have any momentum. Sometimes, those people fail even if they’re given a shot, but other times, you end up with The New Day or Stone Cold Steve Austin and it goes over like gangbusters.

The less it seems WWE cares about someone, the less the WWE Universe will. Just as a guy like Curt Hawkins. It isn’t Swagger’s responsibility to write the show and since he’s only an actor on the program, he can only do what he’s told, so if he’s told to sit back and hang out behind the curtain, no wonder you’ll look at him in a few months and think he hasn’t accomplished a damn thing.

If WWE couldn’t figure out anythingto do with this guy over such a long period of time despite having 3 hours of Raw, 2 hours of SmackDown and an hour of NXT every single week as well as that many writers on staff, that’s a problem with the company itself, not Swagger. He just happens to be one of the many people suffering from a lack of creativity, along with Breezango, The Vaudevillains, Curtis Axel, and others.

When looking at a guy like Hornswoggle and how they’ve kept worse people around for longer periods of time and maximized their use of them, I see no excuses why they couldn’t at least keep someone with Jack Swagger’s history as a regular on-screen wrestler on one of their three shows.

The Case for Jack Swagger’s Fault

Let’s face it, Jack Swagger didn’t make some aspects of this job easy for himself.

Oftentimes, charisma outweighs in-ring talent. If you have a marketable look or you can sell yourself on the mic, you tend to go farther than someone who is bland but can light up the ring. That is why less people know who Lance Storm is than Ultimate Warrior.

Swagger has never been and will never be the next Roddy Piper or The Rock. His lisp was something that made him start with a negative score and he still hasn’t quite translated any of his promos into a more believable dialect instead of coming across as very clearly memorizing lines written by someone else—a problem with many people in WWE today, but an abundance of it doesn’t excuse Swagger from being one of those without the talent to transcend it.

He basically has no character whatsoever. We’re talking about a guy whose trademark for months was to point at his smile. That’s it. Riveting. I guess I’m supposed to hate that guy for having nice teeth? What am I, the gingivitis monsters in a dentist office cartoon for toothpaste?

He went from being “The All American American American American” (aka “guy who wrestled before”) to being “The Real American” (aka “guy who wrestled before and has a racist manager”) to…well…he’s still doing the whole Real American thing, just without the two other people. The most recent incarnation of his character which he’s kept for a few years is just to be an American guy who happens to wrestle, but also conveniently never wears that sweet American flag attire he had that one time.

Outside of his size and the built-in athleticism, he has nothing else to offer. He isn’t particularly interesting looking, he’s not a talker, and he isn’t SO great in the ring that he’s irreplaceable.

Then, there’s the behavioral side of things. You can’t get popped for a DUI and possession of marijuana—which goes against the company’s Wellness Policy on top of being a public relations issue—without expecting negative consequences. When Emma seemed to be wrongfully terminated for “stealing” an iPhone case and it turned out to be a misunderstanding, she was brought back into the company, as those kind of freak accidents happen, but the same doesn’t apply to Swagger, who did it at the worst possible time, too, jeopardizing their plans for WrestleMania.

He hasn’t even compensated for that, either. Where’s the workhorse mentality that someone like The Miz or John Cena or Dolph Ziggler exemplifies? I don’t see Swagger popping up on WWE Network shows left and right, doing promotional tours and charity events and such. In a way, that could be seen as sucking up, but in another way, it’s just doing one of your jobs as an ambassador for the brand and someone who shows initiative. It proves that you care in the growth of the company and you aren’t just looking out for yourself, which in turn will give others a sense that you’re fighting alongside them in the trenches and not just collecting a paycheck.

Also, while I said before that at times, people aren’t given opportunities, Swagger did have the ECW Championship, the World Heavyweight Championship and the United States Championship. A one-shot title reign could be excused, but for all three to not lead to anything memorable is a bit suspicious. If you’re tossed in the deep end and you struggle to stay afloat, but you’re trying really hard, you might be saved. If you sink right down to the bottom, maybe swimming isn’t a skill you have. Perhaps Swagger missed out on his calling, which would be less on the sports entertainment professional wrestling side of things and more in something like UFC, where he’d excel based purely on his athleticism and nothing else would be a factor.

The End Result…

No matter what led to this point, it all boils down to Swagger being a future official release from the company. WWE will move on without him and he’ll figure out something else to do, whether it’s outside of the business or in another company like TNA, ROH or NJPW, and it will be interesting to see how well he succeeds elsewhere.

Both sides are at fault for various means, as this clearly isn’t a case where someone was entirely held back from their potential, nor was Swagger a dud of an acquisition that WWE just couldn’t do anything with. He has his flaws and WWE didn’t find a way to mask them while promoting his positives, nor did Swagger adequately fix those problems on his own.

The best thing to come out of this would be if WWE officials sit back and assess the situation and try to figure out where they went wrong so they don’t replicate the same scenario with other people in the future, while Swagger can go find another way to fulfill whatever it is he’s looking to accomplish. If both sides mature enough, they’ll meet back down the road another time.

What is your opinion of this whole situation? Are you on a particular side or do you think it’s a shared responsibility? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!

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