NXT is basically doing a rolling refresh of its women’s division these days. Developmental prospects from WWE’s various pipelines (the independents and other promotions worldwide, the indies via the ID program, the NIL program, or LFG/Evolve), feel ready for promotion to Raw or SmackDown shortly after they start on Tuesday nights.
The men of Tuesday nights, on the other hand? Guys who make it to the red and blue brands generally seem to do well, but not as many of them get that far. They also seem to need
more time in developmental than their female counterparts.
Fans have been talking about it for a while. Lately, we’ve also seen a bunch of WWE figures weighing in. Some of that stems from how the company itself made it part of NXT’s story when Grayson Waller “invaded” the brand with a worked-shoot promo last month.
Kevin Owens used that as his entree into the conversation during his interview with Canada’s FACES Magazine. Asked who his fellow Canucks should buy a ticket to see when NXT makes a swing North in October, KO replied (emphasis mine):
“It’s very hard to nail one down, and you know, I’m going to echo what Grayson Waller said on NXT a few weeks ago. There’s a lot of very talented people in NXT, but the women of NXT are kind of whipping the dude’s asses right now as far as in-ring work and performance, so I don’t want to just single out one, but there’s a few guys to keep an eye on for sure. I think the people that go see that NXT show, what they’ll walk away from talking about is going to be the women on the show because they’re all pretty excellent. The future is bright for the women’s division in WWE when you see the girls that are in NXT and their work.
Recently retired WWE Hall of Famer AJ Styles recently took a job in WWE Developmental as a scout, coach, and occasional fill-in agent/producer. He also has a podcast he’s used to speak pretty freely about his employer and the business at large. On the latest edition of The AJ Styles Show, Uncle Al weighed in on the trend we’re all seeing play out at WWE:
“I think you’re going to find homegrown more often on the women’s side than the male side. I think that’s the way it is, at least from my experience — listen, I am biased when it comes to the independents. I know what it’s like to be there and bust your tail just to get noticed. So I am very biased, and I think they [indie wrestlers] are a lot better than they’re perceived sometimes…
“So, the women — when it comes to homegrown talent, who come straight from college athletics to the wrestling world, they seem to get it a little quicker than the males that come from the college background, the Next In Line [WWE’s NIL program].
“But it’s quite the opposite in the independents. The guys seem to get it a lot quicker… I don’t know why that is. I’ve tried to figure this out myself. I don’t know if it’s an ego thing where — [on] the independents, we know what wrestling looks like, because we’ve watched it, enjoyed it, want it to be like this and have got an idea of how we sell and what that’s supposed to look like… where the athlete has dedicated their life to that position, where they played that sport in high school and college, so that’s all they know. To be a D1 athlete, to be the top of the line when it comes to athletics — it takes an ego. That ego is still in their system by the time they get to WWE, and we have to find a way to get that out as quickly as possible. Even I wrestled in college, and to a point, I was like, ‘Man, I’m a wrestler. I don’t know about that freaking entertainment stuff.’ Even I had to figure that out.
”So I think that’s what slows the guys down in that process. I could be wrong. I’m just trying to put two and two together.“
The information I don’t have that I’d want before judging Styles’ theory is what percentage of women in WWE Developmental come through NIL and NCAA Division I athletic programs. My hunch is it’s pretty similar to that percentage on the men’s side, if not higher than it is for guys. If that’s right, female athletes would have to be less ego-driven overall. While we could surely find examples of less competitive women’s D1 athletes, I doubt that’s true in a broad sense. I’d definitely want to see some research backing that hypotheses.
The wrestler taking a research-driven approach to the issue is Jordyne Grace. I won’t be making any jokes about why she has free time as long as she’s using it on interesting work like the project GM05 shared with us in The Feed yesterday (Aug. 24):
Clicking through is worth it, but I will share 05’s summary of the explanations Grace suggests for what she says is an industry-wide trend:
- Most women are coming from sports with high transferability to wrestling
- The female recruits have extensive experience being coached on precise movements
- Recruiting for the fairer sex focuses on skill, compared to the “size matters” approach for the men
That gets us closest to the truth, methinks.
Give us your theory on women outpacing men in WWE Developmental down in the comments, or via your own longer take in The Feed!
