In June of 2019 WWE announced that Eric Bischoff had been hired on as the Executive Director of SmackDown, and that Paul Heyman had been given the Executive Director of Raw title.
While Paul Heyman still holds his title, Bischoff was replaced by Bruce Prichard back in October, and there were a lot of questions concerning his exit.
Eric Bischoff recently spoke to talkSPORT about the job, and he noted that his job was to oversee anything related to SmackDown. He said he did everything from licensing, to merchandise, marketing and scheduling. Bischoff also noted that he would oversee creative, but his job was not to create anything for the brand, simply to oversee.
When it came to the reason why he was fired Bischoff explained that he was pretty much self employed for 20 years and didn’t really have to answer to anybody. He thought that since he had done the corporate job thing before he could do it again, but in the end his performance wasn’t what Vince McMahon wanted.
“What I underestimated was just how difficult that adaptation would be for anybody that is good at adapting. It takes time. And I didn’t manage that well. My lack of performance, if you will, in terms of not fulfilling the role in the way that Vince McMahon saw it, that was on me. That wasn’t on WWE. It wasn’t because of any one person or group of people. It was on me and my failure to adapt. I just didn’t work out. It was a bad fit and more of a chemistry issue, really, than anything else.”
The former Raw General Manager went on to say that he and Vince McMahon aren’t really close, but there’s no frustration toward Vince from his end.
“Vince McMahon is not a social friend of mine. We don’t have dinner together when I’m on the east coast or keep in contact a lot, but we’ll share a text every now and again. I still consider him a friend, to a degree. And I have an immense amount of respect for him. So there’s no frustration or anger on my part, because it was on me, not them. I didn’t live up to the job.”
