Thursday, March 28, 2024
EditorialWWE Fastlane 2015: 5 Biggest Mistakes That Hurt WrestleMania 31

WWE Fastlane 2015: 5 Biggest Mistakes That Hurt WrestleMania 31

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For years, WWE has fought against the stigma that any pay-per-view stuck between the Royal Rumble and WrestleMania was essentially filler. At times, that notion was proven incorrect— namely when the Elimination Chamber would result in a title change that switched up the card for the big show.

However, with the inaugural Fastlane event, it was obvious going into it that it wouldn’t amount to all that much. Was there an opportunity for Daniel Bryan to usurp the title shot from Roman Reigns? Sure. Could someone have fallen victim to an injury that would take them out of WrestleMania? Definitely. Outside of those two options, there weren’t many things that could change the game. Instead, this would be used as a commercial to promote WrestleMania more than anything else.

The end result of that commercial was far from what should have been the desired outcome. Fastlane actually did more to screw up WrestleMania than it did to support it. Instead of being more excited to see the matches that will likely be lined up for the March pay-per-view, WWE effectively neutered several storylines and will have to fight an uphill battle and recoup their losses. Here are five ways that WWE took the wrong turn on the Road to WrestleMania 31.

1. John Cena vs. Rusev

It’s time to conduct a poll. Raise your hands if you wanted to see another feud that revolved around John Cena having lost due to the heel cheating and he feels the need to get a second chance to prove that he’s better, so he’s going to dust off his shoulders, admit that he lost and not make excuses, and fight back to win! It’s doubtful many people are eager to sit through several more weeks of that, but that’s what we’re going to be getting.

Good lord, WWE, you purposely booked yourself into this corner! You made it so you have to do more work, when you could have taken the easy route and not had to worry about this. John Cena versus Rusev would have been a big selling point for WrestleMania—the first encounter between WWE’s Superman and the undefeated United States champion at the biggest show of the year. Now, it’s a rematch with the same exact storyline that has been done to death. This could have easily been avoided by booking Cena and Rusev in different matches. Off the top of my head, how about including Cena in the tag match with Ryback, Erick Rowan and Dolph Ziggler? Stack the odds against them by having J&J Security on the opposing team, making this a handicapped match, but the babyfaces win anyway. Rusev can come out to attack Cena, after having won a match earlier in the night against anybody—it doesn’t matter who—and Randy Orton helps save the day and even the odds. There you go. Was that so difficult?

Now, we’ve already seen what a match between these two can be, so there’s no anticipation questioning whether it would be amazing or awful. It was okay, so their match at WrestleMania should just be okay, too, and not anything stellar. However, the ending of this match did nothing to boost Cena, nor did it do anything but harm Rusev. If he had legitimately made Cena tap out, then that would be a different story, but WWE just couldn’t let Cena give up like that, so the end result was so watered down that it ruined all of the taste.

2. Dean Ambrose vs. Bad News Barrett

Like with the Cena and Rusev match, if you are going to do something at Fastlane and then hope the fans will be interested in seeing a rematch at WrestleMania, you need to give them a wow factor, not end things with the wrestling equivalent of a game show “your answer was wrong” buzzer.

Dean Ambrose has lost every important match he’s taken part in for months on end and Bad News Barrett has been losing to people like Sin Cara for some reason. These are two super talented people that are getting shafted and were put in a position at Fastlane to fail once more. Very rarely are fans ever accepting of a pay-per-view match ending in a disqualification, which is the type of finish that barely is even acceptable on Monday Night Raw. The more times that Ambrose gets in his own way like this, the more his character comes off as stupid as opposed to crazy. At a certain point, the guy talking about wanting to cement his legacy by winning a championship should know that he should follow some of the rules and stay away from exploding television sets.

If you don’t have the balls to back up what you said before a fight, don’t open your mouth to begin with. Likewise, if you don’t want to deliver a quality match on a pay-per-view, don’t purposely book it to be underwhelming and expect people to not be disappointed.

3. Goldust vs. Stardust

The promo leading up to this match was great, as it helped establish a stronger foundation for the feud. The segment after the match with Stardust attacking Goldust and blaming Dusty Rhodes for the so-called death of Cody Rhodes also added another layer to the program. The match between these two segments, though, was terrible.

Considering how good Goldust has been since his return to WWE and how good Cody Rhodes has always been, always improving his game, a large portion of the blame doesn’t fall on them for how things went down. If you give Al Pacino horrible lines to deliver, the movie is still going to be panned because he won’t be able to save the dialogue with his delivery. Likewise, if you book Goldust and Stardust in a match where one of them really doesn’t want to fight the other and it ends with a random pinfall that comes off less as a shocking “out of nowhere” surprise and more of a “wait, I just turned around to check on the dog and the match ended? What happened?” fashion, you’re doing them a disservice. For the third time in this list and on this pay-per-view, WWE did not need to do a WrestleMania match at Fastlane, screw it up, and then have to spend the next few weeks rebuilding to a rematch and hoping people care more about it going into the bigger event than they did going into the free one.

4. Sting vs. Triple H

Not every problem was about rematches. For the Triple H and Sting confrontation, everybody who is savvy to the world of professional wrestling knew that there would be some kind of physicality but not all that much. That’s not the issue here, as the amount of fighting was perfectly fine. What this segment was lacking, on the other hand, was any kind of talking from Sting whatsoever.

We’ve already seen Sting two times—three if you count the impostor Sting that looked more like Heath Slater than Steve Borden—and he hasn’t said a word. Stoic and quiet is one thing, but even The Undertaker can grab a microphone and say “rest in peace” once in a while. After multiple instances where Sting was silent, this was a chance for him to come out and say a few words in defense. We know why Triple H has a bone to pick with Sting for two different reasons: his interference in two matches and his legacy with WCW. What we don’t know is why Sting chose to came to WWE in the first place, why he has a bone to pick with Triple H, or why he hasn’t dyed all of his hair.

Instead of learning that information, we saw Sting point to the WrestleMania sign. And then again. And then again. And then to Triple H. And then to the sign again. Wooo?

5. MizTV with Paul Heyman

If you’re going to do a promo on a pay-per-view, have something happen during it. It may be impossible to find someone who could say that they would pay for this event based on the MizTV segment. They just aren’t selling points and considering how much time is wasted on Raw, SmackDown, Main Event, Superstars and the laundry list of other shows WWE has at its disposal, they have no justification on a pay-per-view. At the very least, if you try to argue that this was the pre-show on a free event, you still can’t defend the entertainment quality of it. Did anything happen here that couldn’t have been accomplished with Paul Heyman simply being on the kickoff panel that he normally attends? This was a perfect opportunity to add a new layer to the feud between The Miz and Damien Mizdow, but that opportunity was squandered. Nothing developed between those two, nothing was further advanced with Brock Lesnar, and nothing about this segment was necessary to include. If WWE is interested in having R-Truth come out of nowhere and be in the Intercontinental Championship title picture, more would have been accomplished by having him win a random pre-show match against Curtis Axel or anybody else.

Rather than being a step forward in the promotion for WrestleMania, Fastlane was a step backward and the most frustrating part about that is how it didn’t need to be. Armchair bookers like myself and the rest of the people who are not actually on the creative team can complain all we want that we could do a better job and many times, we would be wrong, but I can’t imagine that WWE didn’t see a lot of these problems coming well before the show. A little extra thought in the planning stages would have gone a long way in fixing these issues prior to them rising up to begin with. As a general rule of thumb, never expect the anticipation to a rematch to be bigger than the first encounter unless you have an ace up your sleeve that you know will truly up the ante. Also, never assume that the end of the match doesn’t matter if what comes beforehand is decent enough.

If this is the beginning of a legacy for Fastlane to always be as underwhelming, virtually pointless and destructive to WrestleMania, by all means, I’d rather see the talented performers take that month off and rest while preparing for the main event program of the year. Fastlane 2016 cannot be booked with the same intelligence as this year’s show or it will develop a reputation for being more trouble than it is worth.

What do you think about Fastlane? Did it help make you more interested in WrestleMania or did it just get in the way?

Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!