Let me preface this article by stating the obvious: Monday Night Raw has not happened yet, so there’s no telling how WWE plans on following up SummerSlam. There’s a possibility that everything that went down will be justified and in the grand scheme of things, it will all work out in the end. However, the ends only justify the means when all things are complete and we can retroactively look back and commend what happened beforehand. Until we reach that point, everything is open to scrutiny.
SummerSlam last night was by no means the worst event WWE has ever had, but there were plenty of flaws that weren’t of the unavoidable kind. Sometimes, when a show goes awry, it’s just due to bad luck with injuries or something, but this was clearly an instance of poor decision making and questionable choices.
NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn showed that the developmental system can flourish in a bigger environment than ever before, seemingly doing no wrong and keeping its greatness stride, while SummerSlam proved that there’s something fundamentally wrong with those responsible for the main roster.
This should have been the biggest SummerSlam in history, but it felt like an experimental B-show that WWE wanted to play around with and use to build up to something else. Following some rough patches over the past few months, this was an opportunity to finish some storylines, put a cap on the summer and start the fall with a bang, rather than a dud.
With that being said, what are some of the biggest errors I feel WWE made during the night?
The 6:00-7:30pm Plan
WWE has a habit of wasting time with the same replicated content, which is nothing new. There’s always been this issue of replaying vignettes made up of content from last week’s episode, then playing another video package made up of the previous two weeks, and so on. When you’re expected to watch Raw, you don’t need to see recaps on SmackDown, Main Event, Superstars, etc, particularly as you have access to the YouTube page which you can use to catch up on things. On top of this, the pre-shows are utilized to catch you up, so if those exist solely to promote the same things you’ve already watched on the television episodes and you can find elsewhere, it gets repetitive and tiresome. At that point, there’s absolutely no need to run those video packages again during the pay-per-view before each respective match. But by all means, if you’re going to repeat things on each TV episode and on YouTube and on the pre-show and still show it on the event itself, give the audience something else on the pre-show to justify them watching it.
An hour was spent recapping what fans have seen for months, with no matches whatsoever. This would be more excusable if the entire 4-hour show was just packed with action, but instead, it started off with a useless promo by Jon Stewart and Mick Foley. As a fan of both of them, I was at first excited to see where it would go, but disappointed to see that the answer was “nowhere”.
Why couldn’t this have been on the pre-show, giving 10 extra minutes to some of the matches? Hell, if you cut out this and the video packages, you don’t need that extra fourth hour to begin with!
Even weirder was the time placement of the opening pyro, which started at around the 15 minute mark. If you’ve spent an hour of a pre-show getting ready for a show to begin, it should begin at the starting time, should it not? This caused a problem for the first match of the night, as Randy Orton and Sheamus had to wrestle in a cloud of smoke because the people responsible for the ventilation of said pyro smoke didn’t get the formula right.
Moving the Stewart promo (which, let’s be honest, didn’t need to happen at all anyway) to the pre-show would have given more time to the card itself and made more sense by allowing the opening of the show to be the opening of the show. At the very least, if the pyro would have gone on before the promo, that’s the thing that would have been covered in smoke rather than a match, which was also not the most exciting kickoff bout to choose anyway as the feud was stale and the performers worked slow, but that’s another discussion for another day.
Is This Raw or SummerSlam?
Pay-per-view events are supposed to be different from Raw, SmackDown and the like. With Raw being three hours, it’s already difficult to distinguish much of a difference as is, particularly with the sets not being as drastically changed for shows as they used to be. However, the bigger issue is that there needs to be a clear divide when it comes to the booking of the finishes for matches.
It’s already frustrating enough when you know that damn near every Monday Night Raw’s main event will be a tag team match that ends with some kind of interference, but cheating the audience out of a finish on TV is different from doing it on a pay-per-view. Under no circumstances should WWE book matches that come off as something you’d see on an average episode of Raw to begin with, but they definitely shouldn’t also give it an ending that seems like it’s more important to set up the next night’s show than this one.
Rusev and Dolph Ziggler have been feuding for months. Just like the Ryback vs. The Miz vs. Big Show program, an injury got in the way, but not just the injury, as WWE was clearly stalling to drag this out from the get go and it bit them in the ass when the injury happened. By SummerSlam, we’ve had so many weeks dedicated to filling time for these feuds that the audience has every reason in the world to be sick and tired of seeing it. Building up to this match at what’s supposed to be the second biggest event of the year meant that they needed to deliver, and deliver damn well. So why is it that Rusev and Ziggler had a count out finish???
There’s no need whatsoever for this feud to continue. If you try to argue that WWE doesn’t have any other ideas of what to do with them, tough shit, that’s what their writing team’s job is to do. Think of something, figure it out, and then do it. If a chef doesn’t know how to cook something, he/she looks up the recipe and then makes it. If a doctor doesn’t know how to fix a problem, he/she sends you to a specialist to get their opinion. If a whole team of writers can’t think of something else for them to do, you don’t just go “eh….let’s just do it again another month, and cop out on an ending with a draw so neither man has lost yet.”
If the plan is to have a mixed tag match, that should have taken place at SummerSlam. It’s the bigger event compared to Night of Champions and there’s nothing involved in a title with this feud anyway to have to stall for that pay-per-view, either. SummerSlam is not the stepping stone to Night of Champions under any circumstance. If the plan is to just have a regular rematch between Ziggler and Rusev, then WWE’s officially coasting and not wanting to put in the effort to change things up and we’re in another Sheamus vs. Del Rio repeat time frame.
Lack of Gimmicks
An overabundance of stipulations can really hurt an event and make it too much of a crutch, but again, I reiterate that SummerSlam is supposed to be special and this event was supposed to be even more special than before. The triple threat match for the Intercontinental Championship technically had a No Disqualification rule built into it, but that didn’t really come into play, which is totally fine. The Fatal 4-Way for the Tag Team Championship was another example where nothing much changed from a normal match, with the only difference being the number of people involved.
However, two matches on this card would have benefited greatly from some sort of extra flexibility, but let’s just talk about one in this section for now. The previous point I made about Monday Night Raw booking not applying to pay-per-views ties into why Roman Reigns, Dean Ambrose, Bray Wyatt and Luke Harper should have been in some kind of Street Fight of some sort. Those four men have proven in the past that they are significantly more entertaining in that atmosphere, which showcases their talents better and allows them more opportunities to play around with their strengths for the crowd. The end result of just keeping this a normal tag match was that it is nothing at all different from what we see every week on television. Did this really feel special to you, particularly after watching these four meet in the ring on Raw leading up to this event in different singles matches or worse, six man tags? How is Reigns and Ambrose vs. Wyatt and Harper in a normal match any better than Reigns, Ambrose and Guy #3 vs. Wyatt, Harper and Guy #3? That second match sounds like it ups the ante, not the first!
If you want to make the argument that WWE is saving that for Night of Champions, I go back to my previous case that SummerSlam is the more important event that should not be used to set up the lesser show. WWE can’t use over 4 episodes of television to set up an event purely to set up another one. By that rationale, why not always do this kind of booking mentality of each show not mattering until you get to WrestleMania, which should only be used to set up the next WrestleMania, and the snowball effect renders everything moot.
With no interference, no turns or twists in the storyline, and nothing else brought to the table, Reigns and Ambrose definitively have just beaten The Wyatt Family outright and unless something drastic happens on Raw tonight to change this up, there’s no need to see these four men meet up again. Simply having them brawl again and then announcing that the No DQ match will happen at the next event is not good enough, because you’ve given no reason as to why it couldn’t have happened at SummerSlam other than “we had nothing else planned for Night of Champions and didn’t want to work on fixing that problem.”
Undertapper vs. Brock Loser
I went into this event sour on this match to begin with, as my point of view was that it served no purpose other than playing with the audience and capitalizing on their emotions. Undertaker lost at WrestleMania. That’s done, history, cannot be changed. That’s the end of this. Nothing Undertaker does to Brock Lesnar can erase that, let alone something as simple as winning at SummerSlam. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if Undertaker has nothing much to gain by winning, Lesnar has even less to gain by coming out on top, because he’s already proven that he’s by far the better man (kayfabe-wise, as Undertaker is still my #2 favorite of all time).
So in a scenario where neither man winning means much and neither man losing is beneficial for the other, WWE figured out a way to make this even more convoluted. Now, Undertaker looks weaker than ever before because he lost at WrestleMania, tapped out for the first time in God knows how long, and cheated to STILL not really win this match. Brock Lesnar is the rightful winner, but what does he get out of it? He’s already established as being above Undertaker, so bragging rights are not an issue, and no title is on the line, which means the landscape of the company doesn’t change in any way whatsoever. All we’re going to get out of this for sure is a long segment on tonight’s Raw where Paul Heyman yells and screams. That happens every week, so why is it something I need to be glued to my TV to see?
Some may say that this will lead to a rematch at WrestleMania. Yay? Undertaker winning at WrestleMania still won’t make up for his loss, nor will it justify him being booked as a punk at SummerSlam even if he wins in a decisive fashion (which, if he does, hurts Lesnar for no reason other than to counteract the previous booking decisions WWE’s made, which is on them to begin with!) If this leads to a rematch at Night of Champions, then we’re back to the argument where the #2 event of the year was structured to set up a filler event, which is ass-backwards.
Ending the show with a controversial ending like this is also tricky because it cheats both sides of the audience from getting proper satisfaction. Undertaker fans will be disappointed in the way he was booked to win, while Lesnar fans will be disappointed in the way he was booked to lose. Win/win scenarios are good, not lose/lose. At least if a definitive decision was made, one side would be wholly happy. Now, WWE has to just hope that everyone is so interested in seeing what happens next that they tune into Raw instead of not watching out of protest or lack of interest. After that, WWE has to hope that what comes out of Raw silences the critics and gets them more excited for what’s coming up next, which can’t just be several weeks of “if you missed SummerSlam, here’s what happened….” videos that lead up to another disappointment.
For my immediate reaction to the event, check out my review podcast which you can find on YouTube as well as iTunes and Stitcher.
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, what happens tonight on Monday Night Raw may change my opinions on the subject matter, so be sure to listen live to the Monday Night Raw Post Show on Mega Powers Radio to get our thoughts on what happens there.
Until then, let me know what you thought about these decisions. Did WWE make the right choices, or was SummerSlam as problematic to you as it was to me? What other errors do you think WWE made that I didn’t include here? Tell me what’s on your mind in the comments below!
