After AEW Dynamite decimated NXT in the "Wednesday Night War," the WWE show retreated to Tuesdays. There were rumblings at the time about people in the company being unhappy with the brand's perceived failure, and we've recently been hearing a lot about the show being rebranded to focus on bigger, younger wrestlers instead of smaller, ageing "indy" stars.
NXT was once very much like like OVW (where the likes of John Cena, Randy Orton, and Dave Bautista got their starts) in the sense that it was supposed to be about creating wrestlers from the ground up. Somewhere along the line, though, the focus did shift to signing big names from the independent scene - like Finn Balor and Samoa Joe - and turning them into WWE Superstars.
Recently, WWE President Nick Khan opened up on these planned changes to NXT, confirming that, "We are doing a complete revamp on NXT led by Triple H, who is really one of the architects of the original NXT." He added: "In terms of an NXT rebrand, look for it in the next couple of weeks. It’s going to have a whole new look."
"It’s going to have a whole new feel, and we believe because a lot of the indy wrestlers, if you will, have come through our system and are in our system with Smackdown and Raw now, we don’t want to just keep doing that same thing, we want to look elsewhere for great young talent."
In other words, the focus is about to shift to rookies and that could be a big turn off for fans of NXT. The problem with the "indy wrestlers" Khan references is that Vince McMahon simply doesn't get them, hence why successful runs in NXT have been followed by dismal main roster debuts.
We'll have to wait and see how this develops.