GM mode was a good concept, but it was broken beyond belief on the game. There wasn't anything beyond the overall ratings of your wrestlers that really brought in ratings. I discovered a way to cheese that system and just annihilated the competition.
All you had to do was trade your first pick for like 3 jobbers. Then book all your weekly show cards as 3-on-1 handicap matches against those jobbers and start feuds with them. Your ratings suck for the first few weeks, but in the meantime everyone else on the roster gets +1 and within a couple months you have like 15 guys with overall rating in the 90's. You absolutely rape and pillage your competition after that and you can do whatever you want from there. Once everyone is 99over, stop putting the 3 jobbers on the cards and just have regular rivalries where anyone that loses gets their win back the next week. You still net a +/- 0 and keep everyone badass. And occasionally, you even trade one of those 99ovr guys to the competition along with some of your jobbers for two guys with 90+ ratings (91, 92, 93, etc) and gradually poach their tops draws that way. Even though you would lose a 99ovr guy, you still get two of their best guys and eventually the guy you traded them will start losing and drop into the 80's. And the jobbers you've destroyed overtime into the 10over ratings will be stinking up their shows big time and dropping their ratings further.
Clockwork.
I mean, after you figured out those tricks, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.