By Pat McNeill, PWTorch columnist

Pink Slips Are Showing: Over the past seventy-two hours, World Wrestling Entertainment has released ten of its lower-card performers from their contracts. We have heard all manner of speculation as to what is causing all this. Some people believe that WWE is preparing to make a move back to a single roster brand. However, that seems unlikely with sixteen full-price pay-per-views on the way in 2005.

Here, the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. My suspicion is that Vince McMahon and new talent coordinator John Laurinaitis have realized that WWE no longer has any serious competition in the sports entertainment industry. Except for Vince Russo's tenure in the creative department, the promotion has never done anything useful with its lower card wrestlers. So why do they need to keep undercard workers under contract?

All WWE really needs is a core group of eighteen to twenty wrestlers per brand. The promotion is all about building up to monthly pay-per-views. The creative team only focuses on three or four matches per major show anyway. So why do they need an entire roster of wrestlers with fancy-schmancy guaranteed contracts?

The next phase of evolution for WWE will probably be to bring in lower-card wrestlers and either pay them by the appearance, or sign them to the equivalent of the NBA's fifteen-day contracts. That way, the promotion can get the maximum use out of someone like, say, Viscera, without having to rely on him to sell tickets down the line. Young newcomers who aren't figure into WWE's long-term plans, like John Heidenreich, can be signed for less money and shuttled in and out of the company's developmental territories as needed. It will become the pro wrestling equivalent of outsourcing, as most wrestlers make the switch from full-time independent contractors to bit players.

The upside is that WWE will make more money for its shareholders by cutting its labor costs. The downside? By cutting back on former featured promoters, WWE is showing less loyalty to the wrestlers who helped put together its record-setting run around the turn of the century. Future WWE performers will return the favor by showing less loyalty to the company, realizing that they're no longer "superstars", but a replaceable commodity.

In this new WWE, a wrestler will only be a valuable as their last run with the company. As wrestlers become more and more interchangeable, the powers that be will be less worried about toning down the exciting high-risk style and protecting their talent. They'll be little more than grist for the WWE mill.

Yadda Yadda Yadda: Jerry Seinfeld used to refer to his Seinfeld sitcom as "a show about nothing". Monday night's episode of WWE was also a show about nothing. There were five matches. Three of them were essentially squash matches. The other two were handicap matches.

The real focus of Raw was on the important stuff, namely the backstage skits, interviews and postmatch attacks. It fit in nicely with the new de-emphasis on wrestlers and wrestling. Mark Magnus and Shawn Daivari's new gimmick ("from the creators of La Resistance") is designed to piss off red-state America, but they'll have to make an appearance before a live crowd before we can see if it works. Trish Stratus got to deliver a few funny lines about her archrival, Lita. Mike Bucci's Simon Dean character was treated like a serious gimmick, complete with his own Simon System commercial plugs during the recap segment. In the course of one night, Adam Copeland proved that he was born to heel, showing the fire he's been accused of lacking for the last two years. Plus, the Survivor Series main event stipulations, with the winning team running Raw for a month, are transparently designed to set up the next batch of backstage skits.

It is a good thing that WWE filled its show with lots of gimmick matches and backstage skits. Otherwise more people were notice that the promotion has put together its worst Survivor Series lineup in the history of its annual Fall Classic.

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Pat McNeill of Fairfax, Virginia has been a Torch columnist since February 2001. He appreciates the hundred twenty million Americans who voted in Tuesday's national election. His PWTorch.com column appears two times a week. His longer, weekly column appears exclusively in the Torch Newsletter. Pat McNeill's first book, "The Tables All Were Broken", is available from many fine booksellers.

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