- Vince Russo is once again trying to argue that he wasn’t responsible for the death of WCW. Russo posted a new column on his website discussing WCW’s fall and his culpability–or lack thereof–ahead of an interview with The Death of WCW co-author RD Reynolds.

In the column (which you can read at the link), Russo uses raw Nitro ratings numbers to argue that the four shows before he and Ed Ferrera joined WCW came out at a 2.9 and actually rose, on average, to a 3.2 for the thirteen shows afterward. It wasn’t until he was sent home and Kevin Sullivan took over the booking that the ratings proceeded to go down to a 2.7.

Russo further argues that once he came back to work with Eric Bischoff to produce Nitro, the ratings rose to a 2.8 and it wasn’t until things had become too disfunctional–causing Russo to, in his words, “break down the things I didn’t like that Eric and I had worked on, in order to once again try to rebuild,” that the show’s ratings began to drop again.

Of course, there are a ton of caveats to go along with this, not the least of which is the fact that–despite his assertion that the numbers are “the only REAL FACTS that are on record as it pertains to my failure/success at WCW,” numbers are very easily manipulatable to slant toward any opinion. By breaking down the ratings averages as he does, he obscures individual trends.

Furthermore, ratings are far from the only “real facts” on record; house show and PPV attendance numbers also factor in as do buyrates–all of which dropped. Russo also ignores the ratings for Thunder; besides, “full” household ratings don’t particularly matter anyway because it doesn’t drive advertising rates, which is how a show’s monetary value to a network is determined (that’s the 18 – 49 demographic ratings). This isn’t to say that Russo was responsible for the death of WCW–at the very least it’s difficult to put forth a serious argument that Russo killed the company all on his own–but rather to point out that his argument of “the real facts” is rather deceptive.