With WWE at a Crossroads, It’s Time for a Real Revolution

Introduction: With WWE’s ratings continuing to find new lows this fall, the company is surely at a crossroads, which is a normal part of the business. It happened after Hulkamania, it happened briefly after the Attitude Era, and now we’re approaching what will likely be remembered as the post-Cena era. So what can the company do to turn things around and move into the next upswing cycle?

Since rising to national prominence in the 1980’s, WWE has traded more on spectacle than actual sport or substance. To see evidence of this, one could simply compare the WWF of the 1980’s and early 1990’s with NWA/JCP/WCW – while WWF traded in Hulkamania and a seemingly never-ending succession of heel challengers who were either foreign or monsters or both, the company best known as WCW featured performers like Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat, Sting and Vader, keeping the focus on (scripted) athletic contests. Then came the Attitude Era/Monday Night Wars, and while both companies indulged in the more soap operatic aspects of the business, WCW was still the best place to find good, compelling wrestling matches on a regular basis (even if they were mostly confined to the undercard). In recent years, WWE has significantly improved their in-ring product (in spite of limiting performers’ move sets and dumbing down the entire process), but all too often, the wrestling itself is secondary to outside factors. Last time out, I looked at lessons WWE could learn from the Marvel Cinematic Universe; this time around, I am going to focus on what they could learn not only from the biggest rival in their history, but also from other entities like the NFL.

Now, admittedly, the cynic in me believes that John Cena’s recent request for time off was a self-serving move in light of the recent ratings trends, and that when he does return, we are going to get at least another half-decade of him being the only person on the WWE men’s roster of any real import, and Nikki Bella will resume her place as the centerpiece of the Divas division. But, as I have often tried to do in these columns, I am going to provide methods in which I think WWE can improve their overall product that will be equally effective with or without this situation coming to pass. I am not entirely sure where I heard it the first time, but an old adage that I heard as a youngster and that I have tried to model my life around seems applicable here: “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst.”

With that in mind, I think the single biggest thing that WWE could do to improve their overall product is to return the focus to the wrestling. While its predetermined nature precludes it from being an actual sport, per se, professional wrestling matches are still athletic contests. When executed to their full potential, two performers working together to tell a compelling story in the ring can transcend wrestling’s carny roots and create moments of pure elation (or, if the heel wins, pure revulsion) that are nearly unparalleled in any other dramatic medium or professional sporting league. Unfortunately, Vince McMahon has spent the better part of thirty years reducing that equation down to its simplest parts in order to appeal to the broadest range of fans possible, which has made those moments more and more rare, at least on WWE’s main roster programming. For every John Cena vs CM Punk at Money in the Bank 2011, we get dozens of essentially disposable Rusev/Ziggler matches that, while technically sound, lead nowhere and do nothing for either performer in the long run. And while that is due in large part to Vince’s well-known belief that wins and losses do not matter (a notion that is not entirely untrue), the repetitive nature of these encounters serves as a microcosm for what I believe to be the largest problem facing WWE in 2015.

Imagine, for a moment, if the NFL or other major sporting league were essentially the same, year after year. Sure, there are teams like the New England Patriots who are consistently one of the best teams in the league (or teams like the Cleveland Browns, who are consistently near the bottom), but that only serves to elevate a moment like the New York Giants’ win over the undefeated Patriots team in Super Bowl XLII. If the NFL were WWE, even if the Giants had won Super Bowl XLII, when the two teams met again in Super Bowl XLVI, fans would have known going in that the Patriots were going to win the Super Bowl, which would have removed a lot of the drama from the Giants’ 21-17 victory. (And yes, I just used Cena’s hometown team, who the Authority are also fans of, as an allegory for him.) More than that, each team from one of the NFL’s eight divisions plays the other three teams twice per season, so imagine if all of those games were exactly the same, just with a slightly different ending – it would defeat a lot of the appeal that the NFL currently has going for it, appeal that is grounded in both unpredictability and a parity at the top of the league.

And while WWE will throw the occasional surprise ending out to stymie fans’ predictions, by and large, we can count on certain things happening – Seth Rollins will lose repeatedly leading to PPV matchups, only to retain his title through chicanery, John Cena will lose the occasional match but will end up winning the feud, and there will almost always be a handful of guys below the World Title level who will face each other repeatedly, sometimes for secondary titles and sometimes just for something to do. And within the matches themselves, while countering and/or “stealing” finishing moves has become significantly more commonplace since the Attitude Era, a great deal of WWE matches follow one of several patterns.

And that is not to say that following a formula is entirely a bad thing, as the “tag team formula” that was popularized by the Rock N Roll Express three decades ago is still the foundation that is used for most of the best tag team matches that have been contested, even to this day. But where WWE often misses the mark is in what they layer on top of that foundation. If they adhere to the formula completely and repeatedly, it takes away from the impact of it all, and what should be the structural support upon which a skyscraper of a match is built instead becomes a set of bars within which the performers’ creativity is imprisoned.

So what can WWE do to alleviate this problem?

On the storyline level, I think the simplest solution would be to mandate that the creative team is only allowed to use so many distraction finishes or purposeful countouts or other non-decisive finishes in each pay-per-view cycle, and also to set a match limit for how many times guys like Rusev and Ziggler can face one another in one-on-one contests during the length of their feud. To that end, WWE needs to start setting hard timelines for their feuds, rather than dragging them out interminably, seemingly because they often appear to have nothing better for certain performers to do. Not only would this eliminate a lot of the repetitiveness that currently plagues both RAW and Smackdown, it would (in theory) force the creative team to better plan angles and ensure that they know what the endgame of each angle they start will be. Obviously, as we have seen repeatedly over the past handful of years, this has not been a strong suit of the creative team, and as I have proposed before, perhaps additional team members need to be hired and/or each creative team member’s duties need to be more clearly delineated while putting a system in place where the various teams work more synergistically. For instance, put someone in charge of continuity, whose sole job is to point out that pairing Rusev and Kevin Owens in a tag team match a week after Owens (and three other partners) turned their backs on Rusev does not make a great deal of sense. And let the agents have free reign over how the matches play out, with input from the storyline writers about what they need to see happen on a week-to-week basis.

At the match level, I think WWE needs to drastically diversify the WWE Main Event Style. When I wrote my two-part series about WWE developmental last year, I lauded WWE for consolidating their developmental program so that all of their up-and-coming talent would not only learn to work the preferred style of WWE main roster performers, but also so that performers whose only professional wrestling experience came in WWE’s developmental system could learn to work with talents from various backgrounds, people who had cut their teeth either on the Indies or overseas. I still maintain that it was a fantastic idea on WWE’s part, and one that will only continue to improve the in-ring product as the percentage of the main roster performers who came up through said system increases. That said, since the WWE Main Event Style became a thing that people talked about, it has largely focused on a fairly homogenized style of wrestling that utilizes punches, kicks and simple moves, which build to impact finishers. In order to increase the unpredictability on a match-by-match basis, start letting performers focus on a certain aspect of their wrestling style. Just as a college student pursuing a business administration degree can focus on marketing, or management, or international business, or business law, developmental wrestlers should become well-versed in all aspects of what WWE Main Event Style entails, but let them focus on submission wrestling, or striking, or chain/mat-based wrestling, or power wrestling, or even tag team wrestling. The pedigree of the Performance Center trainers leads me to believe that they can pretty easily suss out even the most basic developmental talent’s strengths and weaknesses, and by ensuring that they get to focus on those while also learning the rest of the basics, it will improve each performer’s overall ability to work different styles of matches by the time they reach the main roster. A perfect example of this would, in my mind, be Neville, who showed in NXT that he is capable of working excellent matches with a wide variety of opponents with different abilities and skill levels, but who was allowed to retain a great deal of the awe-inspiring aerial acrobatics that originally brought him to WWE’s attention.

Realistically, that scenario would benefit the company long-term, but in the short term, with Cena’s impending absence looming, how could it benefit the WWE in the interim? Simple – by facilitating the return of Daniel Bryan. While Bryan’s popularity in arenas across the country never quite translated into him moving merchandise or ratings the way that Cena has, it is hard to argue that his return would not significantly bolster the current weekly product and that it would almost certainly offset at least some of the financial impact that Cena’s sabbatical will cause. Depending on who you believe, Bryan has already been cleared to return to WWE by his own personal neurologist, yet WWE’s doctors are hesitant to let him return to the ring after a concussion that he sustained in the spring, perhaps in large part because he will not agree to tone down his in-ring style. The easy compromise in my mind would be for WWE to approach Bryan and allow him to return on the condition that he abandons the elements of his move set that are more physically taxing to his neck or could potentially cause a concussion. While Bryan has admittedly been reticent to do this in the past, if WWE were to allow him the freedom to utilize more of the submission-based offense of his run as “American Dragon” Bryan Danielson in Ring of Honor, he might be more willing to concede to their concerns.

And I am not referring to him using the Yes! Lock to finish every match, but actually allowing him to win with a wide variety of finishing moves. While it may lack some of the immediacy that makes the Knee Plus so popular with crowds, allowing him to work a more MMA-influenced style would give his matches a variety that is currently extremely lacking in WWE. Plus, a move he used frequently as American Dragon, where he traps his opponent’s arms and delivers repeated elbows to their head and neck area*, would almost certainly be equally as popular as his kicks. I think a great deal of Bryan’s popularity is based on the emotion that he puts into every move, and by allowing him to expand his moveset, he could phase out some of the moves that WWE deems risky to his long-term health without hurting that appeal, while at the same time lengthening his career and ensuring that he can lead a healthy life when that career is over. It would also allow him to structure his matches differently, ideally limiting some of the bumps he has to take as a result of his opponent’s offense and reducing the risks of future concussions. Arguably the greatest masked wrestler of all time, Jushin Liger, reinvented himself in his forties as a more mat-based/MMA-inspired wrestler after years of high-flying took its toll on his body, so I am confident that Bryan could make a similar transition and enjoy every bit as much success.

We have already seen WWE take steps in this direction in the past, most notably when Chris Benoit and Kurt Angle were feuding and put together a series of matches that featured some of the greatest chain wrestling ever to take place in a WWE ring. But even then, after all of the fantastic counters and submission attempts, the matches almost always boiled down each man’s respective signature moves and finishers. This is where WWE could take a page from the UFC’s playbook and greatly vary how matches end. Some of the best mixed martial fights are so compelling because they are so unpredictable.

Regardless of Chael Sonnen’s testosterone ratio after his first fight with Anderson Silva, the reason that fight was instantly heralded as a classic was because no one expected Sonnen to be anything more than a quick knockout for one of the greatest counter strikers of all time; instead, he came out and imposed his will on Silva, grinding the champion down for nearly twenty-five minutes before the Spider was able to showcase his submission skills. It remains one of the most impressive victories in Silva’s career, and he won in a way that no one was expecting. It was not John Cena winning with a terrible STF after his opponent kicked out of the Attitude Adjustment; it was Cesaro just waylaying Mark Henry with an onslaught of European uppercuts until the World’s Strongest Man was too battered to resist the rest of Cesaro’s offense.**

More than that, WWE could benefit from something that was apparent in the second Silva vs Sonnen fight and something that NXT routinely incorporates into its biggest matches – building on past encounters to inform the strategies of the current match. Going into his second fight with Sonnen, Anderson Silva knew that Chael could put him on his back and keep him there, something that Sonnen was able to do without difficulty in the first round. In the second round, Silva went full heel and grabbed Sonnen’s shorts on more than one occasion, hindering the wrestler’s ability to even shoot for takedowns, and that eventually caused Sonnen to throw the errant spinning backfist that led to his defeat. In NXT, we have seen this kind of awareness multiple times, most noticeably during the angle between Sami Zayn and Cesaro, where they had scouted each other from match to match and each match saw new counters and reversals to what each man had done before. And it also played into the overall storyline where Zayn was desperate to earn Cesaro’s respect, so every time Cesaro figured out a counter for what had worked for Zayn in the past, Zayn had to work that much harder to break out something new, which ended up costing him in their final match. But because he had put in that much work and effort, he earned Cesaro’s respect, even in defeat, in one of those moments that I mentioned before where wrestling really transcended the normal constraints of, and complaints about, the medium.

The recent Iron Woman match between Sasha Banks and Bayley also featured multiple callbacks to their previous encounter and even saw Bayley adopt Sasha’s tactic (going after the hand) in her pursuit of victory. This kind of continuity is something that should feature heavily in any major rivalry in WWE, yet we see people who have wrestled Randy Orton multiple times continue to leap off of the ropes or the turnbuckle at him headfirst, exposing themselves to an alleged “RKO out of nowhere” that was actually telegraphed as soon as his opponent started towards him. That’s why Orton’s counter of Seth Rollins’ Curb Stomp attempt into an RKO at Wrestlemania was one of the highlights of the show – it was not just because it was original (it was), but also because it made sense and showed that Orton respected Rollins enough to have scouted him and prepared a counter for his finishing move.

A move to add variety and continuity to the general match structure in WWE would actually greatly benefit their biggest star upon his return. This is the part of the column where I am going to follow in my colleague Greg DeMarco’s footsteps and say something that I honestly believe to be true but will nonetheless draw a handful of negative comments. Ready?

John Cena is a fantastic professional wrestler.

Even if you do not factor in the ratings, buyrates, merchandise, public relations, or every other outside factor that he has influenced in his time at the top of the WWE, Cena is a physical specimen, easily one of the strongest wrestlers in the WWE, and he has a phenomenal understanding of match pacing and timing; I think the single biggest complaint I see about Cena is that his matches and feuds are formulaic and predictable. If WWE were to re-train their fans that matches do not have to end on a specific move (or worse, a distraction rollup), it would allow far more variety in matches and every Cena match would not have to feature his Five Moves of Doom (which, realistically, is probably six now with the rebound Stunner, as awful as it usually looks). While that in and of itself would not fix the issue with his booking (or the complaints about his lack of selling that are nearly as prevalent as the main one), it would certainly help to lessen the match-to-match tedium and make near-falls more dramatic in Cena’s matches. And by no means am I suggesting that WWE forego finishers entirely; however, if matches ended with other moves with at least moderate frequency, it would greatly increase the unpredictability of what fans are seeing in the ring, and I know that I personally would be a lot less likely to be staring at my phone during Cena’s matches.

At first glance, it might seem like preaching continuity from match to match and unpredictability would stand at odds – after all, if Rollins was ending matches with a wide variety of moves instead of just the Curb Stomp, would that not make it significantly more difficult to believe that Randy Orton could formulate a match-winning counter? But that is actually where the beauty of the Cesaro/Zayn and Bayley/Banks matches lies – not all of those counters or reversals led directly to match-ending moves, but they made the match feel more organic and not like each wrestler trying to fit in a predetermined number of moves. If this was happening more frequently in the middle of the matches, the rare occasions where it did lead to a match-ending counter, as it did with Orton/Rollins, would not only serve as the extremely cool moment that we got at Wrestlemania, but also a payoff for fans who had been paying attention for the duration of the feud. To return to the football analogy, football fans are elated when their team either brings the perfect gameplan and stymies the other team right out of the gate (as the Giants’ defense was able to do against the Patriots’ offense in both of their Super Bowl encounters), or when their coaches are able to make halftime adjustments and pull out a late win. (As a Bengals fan, seeing my team do just that in the fourth quarter against one of the most feared defenses in the league was especially exhilarating.)

Essentially, WWE has spent the past thirty years hobbling their in-ring product by limiting the ways that performers are able to tell their stories in the ring. They find themselves at a crossroads now, with ratings continuing to plummet, and while nothing that I have outlined here is a quick-fix solution that will take them back to the highs of the late-90’s or early-00’s, teaching a new generation of fans a broader appreciation of what professional wrestling can be can only help the business. And taking at least some of the strain off of a creative team that frequently seems to be in over their heads should help the overall product, at least in theory. Obviously, the biggest deterrent to any of this actually taking place remains Vince McMahon, but even after he cedes control to Triple H and Stephanie, they will need to realize that it is not an overnight process. Because it is one that Triple H has already started in NXT, though, I am confident that we could see a return to the glory days of must-see in-ring contests, and hopefully someday, the ideal marriage of sports and entertainment that this medium can provide.

Wyatt Beougher is a lifelong fan of professional wrestling who has been writing for 411 for over four years and currently hosts MMA Fact or Fiction and reviews Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

*And if you do not think WWE would allow Bryan to use those elbows, look no further than the pair of matches between Sasha Banks and Bayley at the last two Takeover specials, where Sasha (in the first match) and Bayley) in the rematch, stomped away at their opponent’s hands while they were trapped in a submission hold and reaching for the ropes.

**That’s also how the best possible version of a Daniel Bryan vs Brock Lesnar dream match would play out – Bryan utilizing his kicks to weaken Lesnar’s base (perhaps even targeting his internal organs in a nod to Brock’s last MMA fight against Alistair Overeem) and his speed to ensure that he kept the Beast from taking him to Suplex City, because he knows that he has no answer for Lesnar’s freakish athletic ability. I know the biggest knock on this match every time people clamor for it is that Bryan could not realistically beat Lesnar, but if it was structured properly and given enough time, it could be one of the best matches available to WWE in this day and age, regardless of who won.