I don't get Charlotte's booking at all, she's the tallest woman on the roster and one of the better wrestlers, why does she need her father's help every single time? If it was up to me I would have had her get a clean win last night and then have a segment on Raw where she tells her father that she realizes that he has become a distraction for her so he can gtfo. Continue booking her as a strong heel champ and then you can have a face overcome her at some point.

Totally agree with this. Someone else mentioned this but WWE needs to get away from the idea that heels are incapable of winning clean. Seth Rollins title run was especially pathetic. But as moorobot pointed out, when you have people like Nattie who go from jobber to #1 contender it's impossible to build up heels as credible threats because there's no true enhancement talent they can mow down en route to PPVs.

I really don't get why they've shifted to this model. We know they think of their product as sports entertainment and hate "wrestling" but wins certainly matter in sports and there's nothing entertaining about matches that mean nothing.

If the past 7 months have taught us anything, it's that scorched earth booing will not do anything to change the minds of the bookers/Vince. Especially when the booing devolves into chants that cause the audience to lose all credibility.

Unfortunately for those who want change, the only thing that will work at this point is not showing up to the shows. Let me state that I am not advocating this, nor do I think that it will happen in the near future, but as long as the "smarks" continue to show up and pay money for merch and food and everything else, nothing will change. WWE have already shown they don't care if you dislike Roman at the top, but add to that the fact that the place last night was packed to the hills with fans, why would they change anything.

I get what you're saying, but don't quite agree with this. The Roman character is less AIDSy today than when he was being jammed into the cookie cutter. The tweener who says "idgaf if you boo me" is an easier character to deal with, and absolutely would not exist if not for the crowd crapping on everything.

I would also suggest that the incredible extents they went to in building entire months of booking around attempting to compel the crowd to cheer Roman also run strongly counter to the notion that they truly don't care about crowd reaction. If they truly didn't care, they would simply have stayed the course and continued with the sufferin' succotash promos.

I don't understand the purpose of booing Reigns for his push at this point. They've already incorporated the boos into the dialogue for one. For another, if they ever decided on a different top guy, they just would pick another superhero. Every cartoon and just about every big action movie still ends with the top hero winning without fail. Kids are still fair weather fans.

Building on LKJs post, one thing that doesn't get mentioned a lot is their decision to have Styles challenge Reigns. If they were totally committed to Reigns being the pure babyface they would've paired him with a heel Kane/Big Show/Ryback. They had to know that Styles would get the babyface reaction (and unlike HHH, Styles is actually a face in kayfabe) so that goes to show they are willing to have Reigns be a tweener.

It's also possible that the long term (starting around WM when it became clear Reigns will never get the true face reaction) plan was to slowly turn Reigns so that Seth could assume the top babyface spot upon his return.

I agree the top spot will always be a cartoonish superhero but Kids aren't tuning in to see reigns the same way they did to see hogan or Austin or cena. That's a problem

The more I think about it, there's a pretty good change Rollins ends up being the guy after all. I don't doubt that it was originally intended to be Reigns but think about the following:

At WM31 they decided last second to abandon Reigns coronation and it went to Rollins instead

Rollins was given the pedigree/HHH rub in general (I know it's kayfabe but given HHHs ego this has to be meaningful)

He got a win over Sting which is like the only time ever a new guy went over a legend.

Right now it seems they believe the solution is that the top guy needs to be a shades of grey type character. JBL got into an argument with fans on his Twitter about X-Pac heat and implied more fans hate Roman than love him, but said the fans reaction to Roman is 'awesome' and means Roman is a star and that people are showing up to see him.

Never expected to see a Chad Dukes tweet make it here.

I listen to him on Chad Dukes versus the World on 106.7 The Fan out of DC sometimes. He also has a wrestling podcast where he is able to get some pretty big names on, but I've only listened to it a time or two.

He's mostly known for being a "Sports" talk show host who never talks about sports. Most of the time it's a nice relief from hearing the same things over and over again. I mostly like Dukes, but I don't think he'd get along with most people here in terms of how he thinks about wresting, but as a dude he seems pretty cool.

Ambrose/Jericho went 26 ****ing minutes? Ffs. Guys on LAW podcast destroyed that match.

I would say it as they've decided Roman needs to be the top guy and then created the persona for him that people won't totally **** all over. They tried very very hard to make face Roman be the man before they went this way, and given a choice I think they'd much rather have a pure face as the top guy.

They had the easiest way in the world to bring back face Rollins immediately last night*, if they were going that route. Strolling in post match and laying out the champ after a grueling match doesn't allow for a lot of actual faceness.

*

There's a rumor that there was a non-wrestling segment that was cut at the last minute.

(If true, I would have sprinkled the extra time a little more evenly amongst several matches.)

I mentioned in the PPV rating thread that Brian Alvarez is claiming it was McMahon talking statement. He is also saying that the cage match went over too much and they had to cut time from the women's match as a result.

I'm all for having a boring "cage" match run over if it means less time for a dumb women's match that makes no sense in story telling.