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Honestly, why should I care about WrestleMania now? I watch the product all year long. I have heard Eps and you make the case, very well, that WWE is dropping the ball by catering to casual fans once a year with their biggest show. Can you give me some reasons why they do that? And do you think those outweigh putting younger talents in big positions to show those casual fans what they are missing?
First off, I feel your frustration, I really do. I have been saying for months that both AJ Styles and Kevin Owens should go into WrestleMania as their respective champions. They have worked hard all year carrying their brands and deserved to go into the biggest show of the year in a strong position. After Sunday’s ridiculous decision to put the Universal Title on Bill Goldberg, we are now instead looking at a Title match where he will take on Brock Lesnar while AJ Styles will, at best, be a challenger (and I don’t expect that to happen). So if all goes as planned, Randy Orton joins Lesnar and Goldberg in the Title matches.
After all, as you mentioned many casual fans come back once a year to watch the big show (and some may even come back to watch The Big Show). In most businesses, the company would use that uptick in customers to expose those fans to the great things that they have to offer.
In WWE’s case however, they put older, part time talent in prime positions and do it at the expense of the guys that did all of the heavy lifting all year long. It makes no sense at all to me to with people tuning in once a year you give them a 50 year old who has still not worked more than a few minutes defending the WWE Title against a part time guy who has decimated the entire roster, except for the 50 year old guy.
Why would they do it? Well in the old days the explanation always given was, “We charge a lot of money for this PPV, we have to put names on it that the casual fans know in the top matches”. While I didn’t fully agree with that, I could understand their thinking. They felt that the names would be a draw for them. But that was then, this is now.
With the advent of the WWE Network, they don’t need to chase the PPV beast anymore. People can either get a free month of the WWE Network or just pay $9.99 for it and get the biggest show of the year. They are not chasing buys any more. I get that they want to have a big name match with Lesnar vs. Goldberg and I am fine with that. That match is a draw all by itself. It doesn’t need the Title attached to it. But it has one and Kevin Owens is now relegated to a grudge match with Chris Jericho. To me, it would have made much, much more sense to have the casual fan tune in and see, “Hey, this Kevin Owens guy is really good and he just beat Chris Jericho, who is a huge star!”
In the case of Smackdown, it looks like it will be Randy Orton taking on Bray Wyatt so they at least could have Orton lose and elevate Wyatt, but that does nothing for AJ Styles, who was the MVP of the brand all year and maybe of the entire company over the period.
So to recap, no I can’t come up with any good reason to sacrifice the hard work that Styles and Owens put in all year. I think Vince McMahon made a really bad decision in both of their cases. Maybe they will both have amazing matches and it will make the casual fan stay on to watch them but there would have been a much better chance of that happening if those fans tuned in and saw those two as long running champions.
Instead, they will tune in and see that nothing much has changed since last year and I predict a significant percentage of them will do what they do every other year: Take the rest of the year off from WWE until next year’s WrestleMania.
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