Dusty Rhodes has been added to the ECW creative team along with head writer David Lagana. Rhodes had previously been working on the Smackdown creative team with Michael Hayes.
According to reports, Lagana requested to have Rhodes moved over to ECW during a recent meeting with Vince and Stephanie McMahon. One of Lagana’s main points in wanting to bring Rhodes over is that MTV’s Wrestling Society X would be competing for the same audience on the same night and that Rhodes could help assit him with new ideas for ECW.
As it has been since Paul Heyman was removed from ECW’s creative team, Lagana will remain as head writer for the brand and will now take ideas offered to him by Dusty Rhodes to fit into his current “vision” of the ECW brand. And as always, Vince McMahon will have the final say of what stays or goes. While at the time many in the business didn’t consider Wrestling Society X a big threat to WWE programming, the 1.0 debut rating the show drew last Tuesday showed it can be strong competition for ECW on Sci Fi and you can defintely tell that WWE is trying to put more emphasis on the ECW brand with Vince McMahon appearing last week, with an ECW Title Match taking place on Raw last night and with a new “ECW Originals vs. ECW’s New Extremists” storyline now starting up.
