Eric Bischoff's time as SmackDown's Executive Director was short-lived to say the least, and there have since been countless reports about why he didn't last in the role. Now, though, the one-time WCW boss has shed some light on what he was doing and what it meant to have "creative control" of the blue brand.
"People use that phrase creative control very loosely and very broadly," Bischoff explained. "They don't really have context. Let's put it that way as it relates to what goes on WWE. In terms of my job. It was the same job as Paul Heyman's. Again, I think this is pretty much public knowledge. I'm not giving anything away too much here. I'm gonna be general."
"Intentionally general as to not violate any personal trust or any contractual obligations, but essentially, I'll speak for myself, I oversaw just about everything that touched the Smackdown product including creative. I oversaw the creative team in terms of managing it, in terms of staffing it, in terms of making sure things get done when they needed to get done and presented to the one person who did have creative control as well as the things that were the business-to-business side of wrestling like licensing and merchandising and PR."
"Anything that had to do with Smackdown, I was directly involved in," he continued. "As I said, it was a very big, very broad job. Very broad meaning it was just focused on the creative. That was a big part of it. Don't let me confuse anybody here by minimizing it, but there were also a lot of other aspects of it that were equally as important."
There was clearly much more to this role than anyone could have realised, but Bischoff reportedly couldn't cope with the pressures that came with that job, hence why WWE ultimately decided that he wasn't the right fit for the role.
What's most interesting about this, however, is that being Executive Director involves more than just deciding what we see on television every week. Check out more comments from Bischoff below: