Spike TV pre-empted Monday’s TNA Impact! with a re-airing of Star Wars III. The Star Wars rerun captured about a half-million viewers. Compare that the Impact, which was drawing around 1.1 million viewers, and you can decide for yourself if moving Impact! back to Thursday nights is a good move for Spike TV.

You can show all the slideshows you want that Impact does better numbers than any other programming on Monday night, but all Spike TV cared about, in the end, was how badly WWE Raw was beating them each and every week.

On Monday, by comparison, Raw drew 4.43 million viewers on USA.

One can expect WWE will want him around at least in the short term, with WrestleMania coming up and Ross being a favorite of several important veterans including, most importantly, Bret Hart.

Also, the risk of releasing Ross right now is higher than ever; with TNA Impact moving permanently to Monday nights, it would take only a couple used travel trailers to get wrestling fans to check out TNA Impact broadcasts with Ross on the play-by-play; he’s be an immediate and meteoric improvement over Mike Tenay.

So it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out; while WWE seems to be wanting to go younger than Ross, his importance to the success of WWE… or TNA… has never been higher.

• Jan. 25: Psych stars James Roday and Dule Hill
• Feb. 1: William Shatner
• Feb. 8: NASCAR’s Carl Edwards
• Feb. 15: Jerry Springer
• Mar. 15: Steve Austin

The Psych stars ought to be entertaining, and Jerry Springer could be loads of fun; but the return of Stone Cold Steve Austin is really the broadcast to write home about. It makes all the short term health insurance NC has to offer seem insufficient; he may be retired for close to a decade now, but Stone Cold still dominates!

These numbers reflect a multi-year rebuilding period from that time; with a fresh injection of young talent and second- and third-generation superstars now nearing their prime, WWE has completed its rebuilding period that began at the end of the Attitude era, when Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock both scaled back their involvement and eased into retirement; Austin left due to accumulated injuries while Dwayne Johnson left to become a legit Hollywood action star.

Green’s funny, don’t misunderstand; I don’t hate him. But I just don’t think RAW needs this kind of stunt to pull better ratings; what they need are better storylines, better booking and better talent. How simple is that?

But, yeah, I’ll still watch.

Vince McMahon should be handing out Fossil watches to everyone involved for such stellar performances as has been building in recent weeks. After a couple years of laying the groundwork, it appears the new talent in WWE is coming into its own and reinvigorating interest in the brand.

Raw’s first hour did well enough to place fourth place in all of cable, behind The Closer and Monk, as well as Raw’s second hour.

Last Monday’s RAW gave me my first live (as opposed to watching it on TIVO-delayed recording) performance by Sim Snuka, who has joined the ranks of Cody Rhodes, Manu and Ted DiBiase Jr. as the latest sons of former superstars to make their WWE debut.

Add ECW’s Ricky Ortiz to the list, by the way.

While these young talents will need to prove themselves just as their fathers (and grandfathers, in some cases) did, these prodigies have been quite bankable for WWE over the years; folks such as The Rock and Randy Orton are proof that sometimes, pro wrestling runs in the blood.

Shane McMahon is the exception, by the way, that proves the rule.

So, quick, before Vince McMahon starts hawking anti wrinkle cream on the air, let’s make this clear one more time: wrestling is what makes people want to watch wrestling. As a recent entry from me showed, with about 90 broadcast minutes to work with on Monday, Raw featured about 30 minutes of in-ring time and over 60 minutes of non-wrestling content.

That mix needs to switch polarities. At the very minimum, a two-hour-plus-overrun Raw broadcast should feature 45 minutes in the ring 45 minutes of other stuff; and wrestling was never as popular as when the mix was 60 minutes in-ring, 30 minutes out.

Actual wrestling matches are what boosts ratings, Vince. Learn it, live it, love it.

The last true “holy sh-t” moment I remember on SmackDown was years ago, when Big Show back body-dropped Brock Lesnar and the ring collapsed. Moments like that create buzz and buzz creates an interest in watching, which boosts ratings. As for RAW, it’s been a while, which is surprising since I generally prefer RAW to Smackdown.

So, in the entire first hour of the program, we were treated to only 17 minutes of actual wrestling in the squared circle. Now, of that, 11 minutes went to a somewhat solid JBL vs. John Cena match. Yet the remaining six minuts was taken up not by one, but two other matches that involved superstars crushing superstars.

In a broadcast hour, minus commercials, WWE has approximately 42 minutes to work with. That means while 17 minutes were in the ring, 25 minutes were spent doing in-ring promos and interviews, wrestler entrance music, backstage interviews and skits, and hyping product for WWE and its advertisers.

Folks typically enjoy wrestling because of the wrestling.

It gets worse; the second hour and overrun ran about 1 hour and seven minutes in broadcast time; of that, only 15 minutes were spent in-ring with wrestlers battling each other, and eight of those minutes were spent on a highly abbreviated main event.

So in the second hour, we had probably more like 49 broadcast minutes with the overrun, and only 15 minutes were spend in the ring. The other 34 minutes was all the same non-wrestling stuff the first hour featured, plus Vince McMahon doing the Million Dollar Mania thing.

So let’s do a final analysis, shall we? In about 90 broadcast minutes, we only got six matches total, ranging in length from two mintes to 11 minutes, totaling 32 minutes of wrestling altogether. The remaining 58 minutes was all promos and extraneous content. We’re getting twice as much “other stuff” as we’re getting in terms of real wrestling.

Something has to change about that, and fast, before so much of the audience goes away, we have to nail closed the exterior shutters and call it a day. On the bright side, if you still have friends who say they don’t like wrestling, now you can honestly tell them, “Don’t worry. Raw doesn’t feature much of that stuff anymore, anyway.”

===

McMahon to Give Fans $1 Million Cash on Monday Night RAW

That was not the only bombshell that McMahon dropped on the RAW audience. The Chairman also announced that a Draft will take place at the end of June, and that all performers from RAW, SmackDown and ECW will be eligible. Every Superstar, Diva and announcer can be drafted to any brand, and the unpredictable nature of the Draft is sure to keep the respective locker rooms abuzz in the coming weeks. “I think our fans deserve new Superstars, hot new Divas, new rivalries,” said McMahon in announcing the upcoming Draft.