Your mileage may vary, but overall, I consider Night of Champions 2015 to be a successful pay-per-view. In the grand scheme of things, the quality of the matches were solid, the surprises were plentiful, and I felt that things were better after the event than what we had going into it.
Were there some flaws? Sure. However, rather than nitpick every little thing possible, this edition of “Biggest Mistakes” is going to focus on the three bigger factors that I think did more damage rather than helping out the current environment in WWE.
Dolph Ziggler vs. Rusev Isn’t Over
This feud has needed to end for a long time, yet it just keeps limping on. WWE never should have tried to stall with the mixed tag team match that seemed to be an inevitability for SummerSlam.
What was the reasoning for that? If Lana wasn’t ready to perform, one month wouldn’t have made much of a difference where she would be able to transition from Jenna Morasca to Shawn Michaels. If she was ready to pull off a match, then why hold it off until Night of Champions when there’s no championship involved?
The match itself wasn’t total garbage, but there’s a lack of support from the WWE Universe about this program. Sometimes, fans are okay with a feud going on for months or even years, but the audience isn’t screaming for this to keep going. No advancements were made in the feud, either. Summer Rae costs Rusev the match—smells like Lana at WrestleMania. Is there a breakup on Monday Night Raw? Nope. Is there any direction to the future of this feud other than “it hasn’t ended”? Nope.
Bottom line, this shouldn’t have continued past SummerSlam to begin with, but even if it had, it should have ended at Night of Champions and in a much better way than what went down.
Chris Jericho is the Mystery Partner
The roof is blowing off this place!!!! Meh, not really, am I right?
Look, Chris Jericho is one of the best ever, and admittedly one of my favorites of all time, but that surprise just felt underwhelming. This was a situation where WWE could have done worse, but they could have done much better, too.
One of the reasons I wanted to wait to write this article was to see if there was any kind of follow-up on Monday Night Raw, but sadly, there wasn’t. Jericho came in to wrestle a match that he had no personal stakes in, lost it, teased potentially turning heel, and then WWE immediately backpedaled to Randy Orton again.
I appreciate the surprise of not knowing that it would be Jericho, but if that was the entirety of this, then we had a build that lasted a few weeks and amounted to nothing substantial.
Some may have been disappointed that this wasn’t Daniel Bryan or The Rock, but that’s not why I wasn’t exactly thrilled with this. My whole issue boils down to whether or not WWE will make this mean something or if it’s just as pointless as the random tag team matches that are thrown together on SmackDown every week.
Jericho seems to have been pushed out of this storyline already and not set up for a feud with anyone else, so my faith in it leading somewhere is fading drastically.
Sting’s Injuries
I don’t fault WWE for booking Sting against Seth Rollins as in theory, it was an easy sell to the event. We can talk about how Sting is a legend and it was special that he got a WWE World Heavyweight Championship match all we want, but that’s not the issue here. The problem from Night of Champions was the way the match was booked with Sting and the risks that were taken.
I can’t imagine many people are going to be looking back on this match as one of the best of the year and yet it still could go down in history, but in a bad way. Word around the rumor mill is that Sting suffered debilitating enough injuries that he could be finished for good. After decades of wrestling outside of WWE, he makes his way into the company, wrestles three matches, and is forced to retire? What a horrible story for such a terrible payoff.
This could just be one of those freak situations where things went wrong and it was unavoidable to prepare for it in advance, but I still can’t help but think that there was some kind of negligence going on. Perhaps WWE didn’t test Sting’s health well enough. Perhaps Sting himself or the officials responsible for making the call were cocky enough to think that he could do more than he could. Perhaps Seth Rollins was too rough, or maybe it all just boils down to “the 56-year-old guy shouldn’t be thrown through a freakin’ table like that and powerbombed into a turnbuckle”.
Whatever the reasoning, I don’t think the end result of the match and what it will have contributed toward the Seth Rollins title reign will be looked at in retrospect as worth it if it means the exchange was Sting’s career, and in hindsight, people will regret that this even took place.
What do you think were the biggest mistakes WWE made when booking Night of Champions 2015?
Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!
