Eric Bischoff has opened up on his departure from WWE after serving as the SmackDown Executive Director for a few months in 2019.

Bischoff has been replaced by Bruce Prichard as the Executive Director of SmackDown. Bischoff did so a bonus episode of “83 Weeks” available on Patreon only.

Bischoff told a story about how the idea of him coming back to the company started after having breakfast with Bruce Prichard, whose idea it was. This led to him being set up with a casual meeting with Vince McMahon at WWE HQ.

At this point, he wasn’t convinced that coming back full-time was something that he wanted to do nor need it for financial gain. After the meeting, several weeks later, he got a second meeting where he was offered the job.

“I didn’t think about it enough, I had to do some internal inventory and make sure that I was mentally and emotionally prepared to make a change as drastic as picking up, moving all my sh*t from Wyoming … not all of it."

He later stated, “I suspected that there was a good chance that it would be a short-term relationship. I didn’t think it was gonna be quite as short-term as it WAS, but in my own mind I put kind of a two-year ticker on it.”

Bischoff continued that news of him getting the job with WWE was made official within 24 hours of him agreeing to the job.

He talked about how his role was to work with every department related to SmackDown. He made it clear that McMahon told him at the start that Bischoff wasn’t to be involved with creative but to just oversee the process.

Bischoff credits the relationship not working because he wasn’t prepared for the radical change in scenery nor fully understanding his ability to adapt to the situation upon starting his job at WWE.

Bischoff stated that he felt like he was drowning due to a number of things like SmackDown moving to FOX and the uncertainty of the brand split. He also praised Paul Heyman for being able to handle and overcome challenges of the workload in WWE including being on someone else’s schedule.

“I knew about six weeks in, eight weeks in, it just wasn’t going to work out. I knew I wasn’t fitting and it wasn’t a secret. It just wasn’t right,” he went on to add. “Vince wanted it to work. I believe that. I absolutely believe that. There was no reason for him to set me up this way. The opportunity that he gave me was amazing.”

Bischoff thinks that both he and McMahon knew it wasn’t working out. He also stated that he was disappointed because he didn’t live up to Vince’s expectations.

Finally, regarding his dismissal, he recalled being told on a Tuesday by someone not named McMahon in the office that the two sides were going to part ways.

“I had to fit in the system and I wasn’t able to do it in the timeline it needed to be done.”