BRM's Thoughts and Kinda-Sorta Review of the WWE Draft

[Big Red Machine]

THOUGHTS ON THE SHOW ITSELF:

Things which happened with no explanation that should have had one:
1. Why does Raw pick first? (I mean come on! All you have to say is that Steph won a coin flip!)
2. Why are the Wyatts drafted separately, but New Day and other factions/teams drafted as a whole?
3. Why were Orton and Neville drafted but no one else on the injured list was? Why not just divvy everyone else up in the supplemental draft?

And the most important unanswered question of all: WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH THE TITLES?
American Alpha got drafted to Smackdown but the tag titles are on Raw, so what are they competing for? Does Charlotte getting drafted to Raw mean that Alexa Bliss will never get a title shot no matter many wins she racks up? Is the US or IC Title going to be the top men’s title on one of the brands? The only possible hint we have about any of this is Steph’s announcement last week that the resurrected Cruiserweight Division will exclusive to Raw, so it seems like this would be the case will all of the other titles as well… except that we had both women and tag teams drafted to Smackdown even though both title belts went to Raw. No matter how they are handling this, there was ABSOLUTELY NO EXCUSE for WWE to not give us an answer on this.



The bickering between the sides was really f*cking annoying. If we’re going to be all professional like this with this draft can we maybe have people act professionally?

BIG pop for first mention of NXT and Balor

First Roman and now Brock? I hope Raw has a good drug testing policy.

Big pop for Randy’s announcement, but I think it would have been a lot bigger if the SummerSlam announcement hadn’t happened yet.

They apparently have some sort of “Draft Center” thing with interviews and stuff going on right now on the WWE Network. Why would you do something that encourages the audience to do something other than watch your TV show?

Matches in the middle of this show are annoying as hell. And kind of stupid, too. Unless you’re going to do a f*ck finish, you are just burying someone who will need to get drafted later. And if you’re going to have matches, why not use a guy like Balor who a portion of the audience is unfamiliar with and would benefit from a nice credible win?

Showing that they’ve learned nothing, WWE now has their announcers talking the “Divas Revolution.” You know. Because the word “Divas” was the only problem with the “Divas Revolution.”

Owens and Zayn both got drafted to Raw… so after all of this hype about how their match at the PPV would be their last, they’re not even going to stick to that.

THOUGHTS ON THE MATCHES:

JOHN CENA (w/Colin Cassady & Enzo Amore) vs. LUKE GALLOWS (w/The Club)- 5/10
The match is continuing during the commercial! AWESOME! Gallows wailed on Cena for a while, then Cena made a comeback. We got a spot that served no purpose other than to make AJ and Anderson look bad, then Cena pinned Gallows clean. So we’ve buried The Club and given you a nice babyface victory on the go-home show, so why should I order the PPV? This match should have never happened.

ZACK RYDER & DARREN YOUNG (w/Bob Backlund) vs. THE MIZ & RUSEV (w/Maryse & Lana)- 4.25/10
Ryder’s getting his ass kicked, but all the fans want is Bob Backlund. I see this happening very frequently to Darren Young in the future. Darren made Miz tap with the crossface chickenwing, so at least they did something right in one of these matches. The crossface chickenwing got a huge pop, but I think that was more for seeing the move than people actually caring about Darren.

XAVIER WOODS (w/The New Day) vs. BRAY WYATT (w/the Wyatt Family)- 4/10
The announcers wonder whether or not The New Day were affected by their experiences at the Wyatt Family compound. Based on how they were acting last night, it really doesn’t seem like it. Lawler proves that he didn’t even watch the damn thing by saying that he loved watching New Day run away. Or maybe Jerry got the “extended cut” where it didn’t just cut away with no resolution.
The announcers tells us that New Day are about to become the longest reigning WWE Tag Team Champions of all time. Then they totally diminish that accomplishment by telling us that at this big PPV… they’re not even defending their titles.
Bray and Xavier did stuff, so I guess Xavier was kind of affected by it, but to be honest, I can’t even come close to putting my finger on how I would describe said effect. I don’t know if he is supposed to be scared or enthralled or any other number of things.

KANE vs. KEVIN OWENS- no rating. TERRIBLE segment.
Zayn came out to brawl with Owens before the match. This resulted in Kane chokeslamming both of them. WHY? What the f*ck was the point of this? To make 49 year old Kane look strong? Then have him kill jobbers? Why make Owens & Zayn look bad? This renders their brawl completely pointless because it’s just a fight between two losers.
Oh. And now Steph picks Sami Zayn. You know… the guy who just got chokeslammed like a sack of sh*t.

HANDICAP MATCH: Sasha Banks vs. Dana Brooke & Charlotte- 3.25/10
I assume this will wind up leading to Bayley coming out to make the save, being drafted, and then being announced as Sasha’s partner at the PPV.
Sasha’s hair, the bright red Raw shirts, Charlotte’s blue bottom, Dana’s VERY purple leggings... Lots of colors in this match.
Holy crap that Meteora to the floor couldn’t possibly have been fun to take. And neither could that clothesline. GEEZ that looked stiff.
The story here was the Sasha was overwhelmed by the numbers and got pinned, except that the match was so short that she looked bad.

CHRIS JERICHO vs. ANTONIO CESARO- 6.75/10
A great match, but nothing that will make Cesaro look good in defeat. And really… wouldn’t it make more sense to have Jericho, who was already drafted, get beaten by Cesaro and then have one of the brand executives say “wow. We want this guy!” and pick him?

BECKY & NATTIE BRAWL BEFORE A MATCH- AGAIN.
They been having these big brawls once (if not twice) a week for a month now… and they’re not even having a gimmick match.

The Club is already broken up. That sucks. Now that I think about it, Raw has three tag teams already while Smackdown has zero.

AND NOW SMACKDOWN HAS AMERICAN ALPHA!

WWE WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Dean Ambrose(c) vs. Seth Rollins- 8/10
Rollins jumps Ambrose before the bell.
Mauro Ranallo worked the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” into his commentary. I think Mauro is the best announcer in the world right now, but that was completely gratuitous.
So they show us Cena vs. Gallows during a commercial, but not the main event world title match?
Awesome match, but seriously: WHY THE F*CK WOULD YOU HAVE AMBROSE PIN ROLLINS CLEAN IN A WORLD TITLE MATCH ON THE GO-HOME SHOW? In fact… why would you have this match at all? As Cole reminded us, Seth gets another shot this Sunday on PPV, so this match didn’t matter in any way at all.
THOUGHTS ON THE SUPPLEMENTAL PICKS:
- Steph and Foley picked Golden Truth in the first supplemental pick. The list of people still left at that point is too long to reproduce here, but suffice it to say that Shane & Dragon immediately made them look like idiots by picking the Usos.

ALEXA F*CKING BLISS TO SMACKDOWN!

Tonight’s picks from NXT were Balor, American Alpha… Nia Jax, Alexa Bliss!, Mojo Rawley, & Carmella. I think there are going to be a lot of disappointed NXT fans out there expecting Bayley Aries or Asuka or Joe. Also… for the same reason that picking Rollins and Ambrose as the first two is the right thing to do, it makes no sense that these GMs would pick undercard jamokes like Mojo or Carmella or Alexa over the people I listed above.

While we’re on the subject of NXT picks… I’ve said for a year now that the Divas Revolution decimated the NXT Women’s Division… and now they’re draining it again before it even had the chance to recover. They left them two headliners, but they took the three women below them, which leaves the division with two main eventers… and no one else who has been on TV long enough to not feel like a jobber.

Bray and Rowan are together on Smackdown, but Braun Strowman is on his own on Raw. Yeah. Because this worked out so well when they did it with Erick Rowan and Luke Harper.

The Vaudevillains got draft to Smackdown while Sin Cara got drafted to Raw. Yeah… it’s probably a good idea to separate them for a while.


OVERALL THOUGHTS:
The one thing that leaps out at me here is the lack of change. Everyone is on the same brand as the guys they have recently been feuding with. It feels less like they divided up the roster and more like they divided up the feuds. Raw gets Owens vs. Zayn, Rusev vs. Titus, Enzo & Cass vs. Gallows & Anderson, Sasha vs. Charlotte (& Dana), while Smackdown gets AJ vs. Cena, Becky vs. Nattie, Corbin vs. Ziggler.
We also saw almost no units get broken up. Only the Wyatt Family and the Club partially got broken up, and also the Lucha Dragons were separated, but they actually broke up last week. This is supposed to feel like a “new era” but it feels like the only change is that we’re going to get to see Mick Foley and Daniel Bryan every week.
This was a HUGE letdown. All of the hype around this “brand split” made it feel like we were going to get some sort of big reboot tonight, but instead we got exactly that: a brand split. Instead of something new, we’re just going to be getting the same old WWE, but split onto two shows.

[KILLdozer]

Carmella on the main roster?

Worst overall decision of the draft bar none.

[NWK2000]

Yeah, splitting up tag teams is a hoot, it worked out so great for the Dudleys in 2002.

Honestly I think that the Tag Team division will be the biggest beneficiaries to the Draft. People like The Ascension or Breezango who've gotten no TV time now have the opportunity to be used in angles and feuds. Sure. the changes might not be inherent, but I think that that's to do with the fact that they're also building a Pay Per View simultaneously. Give it until a month after Summerslam, which they're also trying to build towards right now, and the changes will begin.

[Big Red Machine]

Yeah, splitting up tag teams is a hoot, it worked out so great for the Dudleys in 2002.

I agree that there are some tag teams shouldn't be split up, but some teams like Breezango could have been (even should have been) to create a sense of change. The Lucha Dragons were the best candidate for this, but they split them up last week for no real reason. If you've got Cesaro going to Raw and Nattie going to SD, why not just draft Tyson Kidd to SD as well so you can say that they split up.
Or do something like separate Bray from his guys and focus on the fact that they're gone, which will feel new for Bray and when Harper comes back, have him step in and lead the former Wyatt Family on Raw to give them a new feeling. Something to make things feel different. (and then you can turn Bray babyface and have him talk about how Luke Harper stole his family from him).
Or take a team that you know won't go anywhere and has already run it's course like the Vaudevillains and the break them up so you can use them as jobbers for a while before releasing them.

I'd even argue that it's a good idea to split up some of the teams that "shouldn't" be split up- at least for a few months. The Usos have known nothing but tag team wrestling their whole careers. What do they do now that they're split up? Do they tr to be singles guys, or do they look for a new partner to tag up with. You can get a good month or two out of one of them trying to be a singles guy but not doing so well on Raw while the other one tries to find a new partner on Smackdown, teaming with a bunch of different guys for a while but never having much success. Maybe that guy eventually teams up with another tag team specialist who got split up from his partner (one of the Colons?) and they kind of have a run but fail to win the titles. By now we're in mid-fall and both GMs realize that their Uso and their Colon are floundering in the current environment, so they trade Jey for Epico and now we have have not only established that trades can happen, but created a bunch of fresh tag team match-ups on both shows.
The problem is that WWE's extremely narrow definition of a wrestling show story doesn't include stories like this (as I laid out here: http://54.88.31.224/thewrestlingrevolut ... 18&t=16238 ), so such things would never occur to them.

Honestly I think that the Tag Team division will be the biggest beneficiaries to the Draft. People like The Ascension or Breezango who've gotten no TV time now have the opportunity to be used in angles and feuds. Sure. the changes might not be inherent, but I think that that's to do with the fact that they're also building a Pay Per View simultaneously. Give it until a month after Summerslam, which they're also trying to build towards right now, and the changes will begin.

The problem is that they way they did the draft mostly feels like it precludes the possibility of change. All they've done is reduce the talent pool available for each guy to work with, so the way they divided the rosters up just means there will be even less time than usual before they go back to Ziggler vs. Corbin or Usos vs. Dudleys or Sasha vs. Charlotte or Owens vs. Zayn... and that last one in particular I think is a big mistake because Zayn needs to be given the opportunity to develop as a character without having Kevin Owens constantly tied to his hip, and with the intensity of their feud, the only way that should be able to happen is splitting them up. Plus, if you split them up while they still feel hot, the moment when they come back together to reignite their feud- both as bigger stars than they are now- will be HUGE.
(Actually, with the way things were, Zayn and Owens' feud would have been the perfect tool to get over a few important ideas: I'd have them drafted to different shows so that Battleground is their last match ever. Then have Owens win that match via some manner of total bullsh*t like his feel on the ropes. On Raw you have Zayn sad that he lost because Owens' win was total bullsh*t. On Smackdown you have Owens cut a promo bragging about his victory. On the next Raw you have Zayn cut a promo saying that Owens should shut up... so of course Owens brags again on Smackdown. On the next Raw Zayn vows to "do something about it" and then on Smackdown you have him come out through the crowd to attack Owens. This would, of course, lead to a short "legal negotiations" storyline between Shane and Steph that would play out over the course of the week on WWE.com, and by Raw we would have it announced that anyone who shows up on the other show will be suspended [like WWE did with Taker and Triple H after the first draft]... but also that in the interests of deciding a clean winner, Owens and Zayn will have one last match at Summer Slam which will be your big violent gimmick match for the show, which will be won by Owens, both to even out the victories in interpromotional matches [assuming Brock beats Orton] and so that Zayn still has something to accomplish when they eventually come back together... all while pushing the special nature of the Big Four as a place where interpromotional matches can happen and also to establish the "you can't show up on someone else's show or else" rule.)