This article was originally intended to be a preview for Clash of Champions, and in certain ways; it is. But I won’t be going down the card match-by-match and offering thoughts or predictions. Instead, I’m going to confess that I’m just not excited about it. I’ve been thinking about it throughout the week, knowing that I needed to write something about the show leading up to it. But I also need to be honest in how I represent myself and Kwinn here. I watched half of Raw before having to take care of something at home. I didn’t watch SmackDown this week. It’s in that sense that I’m not really qualified to provide context for Clash of Champions. Instead, I’ll look at Clash of Champions through the lens of someone struggling to keep pace with WWE’s demanding schedule, and look at what may be a difficult road ahead for WWE.
Back before we knew how the roster split would shake out, fans and writers alike speculated about what the future might hold. Some figured that WWE would obviously repeat the mistakes of the first brand split because they/Vince McMahon only knows one way to do things. Others held a more optimistic view, having faith that they’d learn from what did and didn’t work the last time around and have a much better accounting of themselves this time. Amazingly, while some of the same mistakes have been made, the new mistakes have just as much harm.
Primary among those mistakes is doubling up on pay per views during non-big four months. In order to be truly caught up on WWE by the end of this Sunday, one would need to watch a grand total of sixteen hours of programming over the two weeks spanning September 11th through the 26th. And that’s “allowing” you to skip Superstars and Main Event. Assuming you give yourself a full 8 hours for sleep per day, that’s essentially one full day out of fourteen you would need to dedicate to watching WWE programming, just to say you’re completely up to date. That’s a massive request to make of your audience. It’s also easy to see why more and more people are opting not to watch live, but rather catch up via Hulu, YouTube or somewhere else.
Going back to our speculation pre-roster split, Wade Keller of Pro Wrestling Torch, correctly called for WWE to make some effort to address the obvious issues raised by the roster split. In specific: the issue of filling the same five hours of weekly programming with reduced rosters for each show. In the weeks leading up to the draft, our minds raced with the possibilities of who would be called up from NXT. Who might be signed or brought back? Surely, they’d need to fill out the roster with some mixture of names from the past, and future stars as well. We’re now two months into the roster split, and it’s probably safe to say that we all had our hopes entirely too high, regarding that effort. The returning stars haven’t amounted to much yet, the NXT call-ups have been a mixed bag.
Generally, each division on each show suffers from the same issue: stars up top, and then a huge drop off in star power for everyone else. Using the Raw Roster as an example, let’s look at the lay of the land in the singles heavyweight division, since it’s given the most importance in the company:
Singles matches on the Clash of Champions card:
Kevin Owens (c) Vs. Seth Rollins for the Universal Title.
Rusev (c) (w/ Lana) vs. Roman Reigns for the US Title.
Sami Zayn vs. Chris Jericho.
Cesaro vs Sheamus, to determine a winner in their best-of-seven series.
Non-tag team heavyweights not on the show:
Big Show, Bo Dallas, Braun Strowman, Brock Lesnar, Curtis Axel, Darren Young, Jinder Mahal, Neville, Sin Cara, Titus O’Neil.
The two biggest names are Big Show and Brock Lesnar, both of whom are extremely part time at this point. Braun Strowman is being protected for the moment, but he doesn’t have a direction yet. Everyone else has little or no credibility. So at this point we are working with eight or nine wrestlers in the Raw heavyweight division that anyone could reasonably take seriously.
That sounds good, until you look at the history of those eight wrestlers. After Sunday, it’ll be a long time before they can have Cesaro and Sheamus in a singles program again. The same goes for Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens. Roman Reigns will almost certainly be the next in line for a Universal Title match, unless they go with the Sheamus/Cesaro winner, which seems doubtful. In that case, Reigns either faces Kevin Owens or Seth Rollins. Rollins was in a feud with Reigns all last fall, when Rollins was with The Authority. Kevin Owens seems to make logical sense, and you could probably stretch that out until Royal Rumble/Wrestlemania season. Then what?
The Future
That’s the future WWE needs to be planning for now. Otherwise they’re throwing in the towel and resigning themselves to things getting worse before they get better. Thankfully, I can’t imagine that’s the case, but with nothing else to go on, the prospect of watching all of these hours of WWE television looks to remain unappealing. Any solution I recommend would have widely varying degrees of happening at all. So, here’s my request: do something. Anything. I’d take Braun Strowman brutally burying everyone’s favorites for months on end if it meant seeing something new. What can’t continue to happen is the status quo. The size of WWE’s TV deal—and therefore the television audience—is crucially important to the company’s financial health. As it erodes, so too does WWE’s rights fees bargaining power in just a few years.
It’s possible that the time has come for WWE to stop asking themselves why fans are watching less, and instead ask what reasons they’re giving fans to keep watching. Clash of Champions looks like a good show on paper, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The context WWE provides makes a good show on paper feel like a chore we all have to get through on Sunday, and that’s a shame.