You might hear people say that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. Let me take that a step further. Imagine if that basket you are going to bank everything on is already worn out and in horrible condition. The handle is falling off, there is a hole in the bottom, and it is just simply ready to fall apart on you. This is the kind of basket that might make you think twice about putting one egg in there, let alone all your eggs. That is pretty much the current state of the diva division.
The fact that the WWE seemed to have no proper direction this week off of AJ's concussion seems to make it obvious that whatever angle they might have had planned revolved around AJ. Even though she is not the centerpiece, she is their top periphery diva. During this dark age, she is as good as a centerpiece, in terms of what the WWE is doing with her. A situation like this is another reason I feel they should have been developing other divas to be stars aside from AJ. They are obviously not following up properly with Brie Bella alongside Daniel Bryan. Even though I am not a fan of AJ Lee, that is not the reason I think they should spread things around better. Putting all your eggs in one basket like this, only having what you want to be your one real diva angle revolve around AJ Lee, just sets you up for a sloppy situation when something happens to her. If the WWE was developing a better storyline for Brie, I would imagine her facing someone in singles action this week, or at least a regular 2-on-2 tag. You have had two 6-diva tags this week. Pushing quantity over quality is not always a good thing. It's not going to help these women get over. It is not a sign that you really care about their success. That is not how the WWE develops divas they want to be a success.
And this is the absolute worst time that you would want to do something like this. This is not the first time in the diva division that the WWE did something close to figuratively putting all their eggs in one basket. After Trish and Lita left, their top concern was creating a new centerpiece. Aside from that, they weren't doing much to develop anybody to be a star. They paid the price for putting all their eggs in one basket back then, since all their attempts to make a new centerpiece flopped, and they ended up with a diva division that would look very dry at times, but it didn't look as bad as it did now. Why? In terms of the little allegory, the basket was still strong back then. You had a wide array of good credible jobbers. Your most over diva was even one of these credible jobbers. Even though they would sometimes do these multi-diva matches, things still looked more respectable than they do now.
You can even compare this to the first dark age. Things looked bad for a while after Sable left. You had some credible jobbers, but they weren't being used very well for the most part to help the division look respectable. Difference is, the WWE did a better job of spreading things out. They had multiple periphery divas to feature, including eye-candy divas, and they did it well. These days, eye-candy periphery divas aren't as effective as they once were and are being treated worse than they were back then. You can say that this was a situation where the basket was weak and close to breaking, but the fact that the WWE spread the eggs better, or spread the attention better, saved things from getting too ugly.
Things are getting ugly. Look at those two eras in the diva division I just talked about. Look at what made them good. The WWE had a strong foundation with their credible jobbers to prevent a bad collapse when the centerpieces weren't working out. The WWE had a lot of periphery angles going on to keep things interesting even when they weren't going for a solid women's division. Now, take that all away. That is the situation you are getting right now. You do not have multiple good diva angles going and your structure is the weakest it has ever been. Not only are they putting all their eggs in one basket, the basket isn't strong.
One last thing I want to mention. About a year ago, I talked about a situation in football where the starting quarterback might get injured, they send in the backup, and the coaches don't even bother supporting the guy filling in. That can be found here. Obviously, what is going on now is not the exact same thing. You don't have a centerpiece the WWE is trying to develop to be a star going down and the WWE treating the interim centerpiece mediocrely. It is close enough. The WWE's top periphery diva, who also happens to be holding the Diva's Championship, gets injured, the WWE features a whole bunch of women as filler, and you can see that they are not trying to be productive with what is going on. They are not exactly showing a winning attitude.
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