Every year, it seems like there are rumors that a second Money in the Bank ladder match will take place which will featuring the women’s division, granting the victor a title shot at the Women’s Championship whenever she so chooses.
Nothing is set in stone, but at the moment, it doesn’t seem as though WWE will be going ahead with that concept this year, but is that a mistake? Is it something WWE should consider, or would it just be a disaster?
Upon thinking about this, I decided to write up a 3-part article series examining the pros and cons of adding another ladder match to the card that would feature the Women, the Midcarders and the Tag Team, but before we get into the other two which will be coming later this week, let’s take a look at the Women’s Money in the Bank ladder match concept.
Positives
The most obvious reason to do this would be to illustrate the level of equality that WWE is striving to promote. The Divas Championship design was abandoned with the belt changing to a replication of the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, so since the men have this gimmick match and opportunity, shouldn’t the women?
It would also be beneficial to whomever the first winner would be, as she would be making history not only as the first ever woman to win a briefcase, but also most likely would be adding a championship to her list of accolades. It’s highly unlikely WWE would have the first woman cash in and lose, so that could even lead to a potential first title reign for a handful of women (Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch, Dana Brooke, Lana, etc)
At the moment, Charlotte stands head and shoulders above the rest of her competition and nobody outside of the injured Sasha Banks seems like they could stand a chance to actually dethrone her, so if a title defense would be a foregone conclusion, why not circumvent that boredom by giving us a match we can’t predict the outcome for?
Negatives
WWE tends to stay away from putting the women wrestlers in gimmick matches. In fact, to the best of my knowledge and recollection, no woman has ever competed in a ladder match in the history of WWE, although they certainly have in other promotions.
In previous eras, one of the main reasons to not entertain this idea was safety. Simply put, a lot of the women on the roster used to just be glorified models who had no talent and couldn’t be trusted to have the proper level of athleticism to pull off a match like this without doing serious harm to themselves or others. There’s a ton of potential for incredibly damaging injuries in ladder matches, and if you can’t trust someone (male or female) to perform safely, you can’t add them into the match.
Sadly, while the caliber of wrestlers in the women’s division has increased considerably since the darker times, there is still some holdover. I would expect Natalya, Paige, Becky Lynch and some others to do fine, but I shudder to think what could happen with Rosa Mendes or Eva Marie trying to fall off a ladder or do a move off one.
Once you introduce this, too, then you kind of have to keep doing it for fear of looking sexist if you took it off the card in future years. With it not existing at the moment, things are kept a little hushed, but once you open up the can of worms, you also run into arguments that people could make that there should also be a women’s Royal Rumble, a women’s Hell in a Cell and so forth. Just from a booking scenario, you don’t want to limit yourself to always having two of each gimmick as it could sometimes be overkill.
The roster is also so thin that normally, only three or four women are given any true spotlight at any given time—sometimes only just the two in the title picture. If WWE were to have this match and feature every single active main roster woman other than Charlotte, there still would only be one or two names that could realistically win, but if you want to keep them away from the title scene for a while to tease their cash-in, you’ve just limited yourself to not being able to use them for upcoming pay-per-views in title defenses. Would you want to see Paige win a Money in the Bank contract and then instead of her facing Charlotte down the line, her spot is given to Summer Rae to entrust with a 1-month build to a pay-per-view? I’m not so sure that would be best for the special events themselves to take someone out of the running like that.
Judgment Call
I think the bad far outweighs the good when it comes to this particular Money in the Bank duplicate, although that’s disappointing, as it’s something I would like to see happen at least once. It would give the women an opportunity to do something different to spice things up, but nothing says that the final outcome is guaranteed to be great. There’s just as much of a chance, if not more, that it could be a mess, which would just harm the perception of the division even more, as it would have a direct comparison to the men’s ladder match later on in the evening, which is typically one of the most entertaining matches of the year. That’s a hard act to stand next to, and if the end result would be a confusing way to book around the briefcase holder and the champion’s future defenses, then it would all be for nothing but to add more confusion to the mix, right?
There’s definitely some interest, and if I could see more positives coming out of it, I’d be all-in for a women’s Money in the Bank ladder match, but if I were in WWE, I would probably have to veto the idea at least this year.
What do you think, though? Is it time for WWE to have a Money in the Bank ladder match dedicated to the Women’s Championship? Am I missing a bunch of positives that should sway my opinion the opposite way? Let me know in the comments below!
