A recent report explained that ending the brand split between Monday Night Raw and Friday Night SmackDown, but that won't solve the company's biggest booking issues. Ever since it was reintroduced back in 2016, dividing wrestlers up between the red and blue brands has been about as divisive as the act itself. The purpose was to drive viewership for each show, with fans knowing they'd only be able to see their favorite wrestlers on particular nights, but that isn't how things worked out.
In true Vince McMahon fashion, he played fast and loose with his own rules, and it didn't take long for the brand split to lose meaningfulness. The top stars from Raw would show up willy-nilly on SmackDown and vice-versa, making the divided roster meaning nothing, the draft mean nothing and took the wind out of Survivor Series' sails on a yearly basis.
The brand split succeeded in one area, though: it generated a bit more opportunity for mid-card acts to get television time. Sure, the likes of Brock Lesnar and Roman Reigns were appearing on both Mondays and Fridays, but recent NXT call-ups and women outside of the Four Hoursewoman of WWE were generally firmly planted on either Raw or SmackDown. This created television time and opportunities to get over, with recent positive examples of this being Theory and Raquel Gonzalez.
The brand split was far from perfect, but it at least created opportunites in a vaccuum. Five hours of television was split evenly between two rosters, hungry for the spotlight. The end of the brand split would mean the end of that pariety. While McMahon would skirt the rules for the likes of Reigns, midcarders were left on their respective brands to work matches, cut promos and even put on the occasional talk show. If that divide is truly gone, now there's nothing preventing WWE from rolling out the same two dozen or so wrestlers on both nights, burying anyone who isn't currently the apple of Vince's eye.
Wrestling is a business where performers make their own luck to a degree. Sometimes they're given crummy storylines and have to do their best to make it work. Still, it's hard to imagine wrestlers such as Gonzalez, Shinsuke Nakamura and Finn Balor not getting lost in this shuffle. Fans will be treated to plenty of Cody Rhodes, Seth Rollins, Charlotte Flair and Becky Lynch while the likes of Ricochet, Butch and Carmella may struggle to find a place on either show. That's a major issue for WWE, and they tend to put too many eggs in one basket as it is. The Bloodline has ever major men's title, for crying out loud. The roster divide falling will only increase that problematic tendency.