By Wade Keller, PWTorch editor

If WWE Raw is not on USA Network in a few years, Thursday will be looked at as the day that set the course for disaster. Thursday, WWE announced Raw will be three hours every week and fans will interact with the show to determine matches and stipulations.

This is a bad move for several reasons. For one, they haven't shown lately they can consistently produce a compelling two hour show start-to-finish.

Also, three hour wrestling shows don't work. Almost nothing good lasts three hours. Great movies rarely can get away with being three hours and holding people's attention, and when they do, they're the exception to the rule. They're also a product of huge budgets and years of writing and production that add up to being worth people's three hours of attention.

Rarely are live sports games three hours, other than NFL games. People complain about football games being too long, but at least those who watch the games tend to have a rooting interest in a winner (or, fantasy players doing well), the outcomes have tangible ramifications (earning a spot in the playoffs), and there's a long off-season to build anticipation for the next 17 game season.

Even more poignant, though, is how awful WCW Nitro became when it stretched to three hours. The middle two hours - once you got past the first half hour and long before you got to the last half hour - felt interminable because the bookers just don't have the creative juices week after week to fill that much time in a meaningful way.

WWE doesn't have enough wrestlers who fans are invested in to fill three hours each week. WWE doesn't have enough titles that mean enough for the matches that wrestlers engage in to feel important.

When WWE increased their PPV schedule to twice per month, it bombed. They cut back after realizing that people who were buying every PPV - one per month - couldn't justify two per month most month, so not only did they skip the extra PPVs, but they became more selective with all PPVs. Someone who bought all 12, once they jumped up to over 20 per year, was likely to just pick the best six per year instead. They were going to miss some anyway since ordering 20+ wasn't an option, so they actually cut back.

WWE is, to use a popular saying, killing the goose that laid the golden egg. They're using up the nutrients in the soil, skipping the crop rotation. Pick the cliche or saying you like best. This has disaster written all over it!

Vince McMahon cannot continue with the same approach he's been taking and expect anything but a diminished ratings. Raw will no longer be in the running for the top rated show each week on cable. I predict, with the three hour format, ratings more often than not below 2.5. I think within six months, we will see a 2.2 rating.

Fans are going to start to pick and choose which weeks they watch Raw, which hours they watch, which segments they watch. They will flock to online highlight clips, saving themselves hours of watching filler that Vince McMahon clearly has put no thought into and characters wrestling longer matches that fans have been conditioned to believe don't even matter that much anyway.

The idea of the show being "interactive" saving this from being a completely disaster is wishful thinking. Fans are used to controlling a lot of things in this era of technology. They can control how the home screen on their phone looks, the big picture on their Facebook home page, what their ring tone sounds like, which video game system they play, what shows from Netflix of on-demand they watch and when. But at some point, it's up to the experts to decide what's best for them and to let viewers settle in for the ride.

WWE, by pitching that fans decide who wrestles whom or what the stips are, is essentially telling viewers "we don't know what we're doing." Imagine going to see "The Avengers" and people got to vote on their phone for which costumes the super heroes wore, what battles they would engage in, which bad guy to go after first, etc. That's not why people go to movies. That's why they play video games. People go to movies to be taken for a ride, not to sit in the driver's seat.

In a few years, this might be looked back on the same way historians who have studied WCW's demise look at the decision to expand Nitro to three hours while adding Thunder to the mix.

In a future Keller's Take, I plan to explore how to make the best of this seemingly awful decision by WWE, driven by quarterly profit motive to prop up sagging stock values, certainly not driven by a desire to secure the long-term viability of the Raw brand on cable TV.

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