May 25, 2017
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Book It. When I sat down and started to curate topics for me to use for the next set of postings I wasn’t sure where to start. Than I realized that even though it happened about a month ago, I still hadn’t covered the Superstar shake-up that happened the week after Wrestlemania, so I’d like to address that little darling of a move by WWE.
Personally I think that’s a little ridiculous. The man defended the title twice and lost it to Orton at Mania. Why wouldn’t you have Bray win the title and build smackdown around him? Make him the superstar he should be instead, they have Bray job out at mania, then go to Raw and effectively has been lost in the shuffle until the last couple of weeks where he became a member of a 5 way extreme rules match to determine the #1 contender for the WWE Championship.
Again call it biased but this is some shitty booking on WWE’s part.
But, the shakeup hasn’t been bad for everyone. Case in point, Raw got Alexa Bliss, an already bonafide star in her own right and she walks in and captures the Raw Womens’ Championship. That’s a hell of a feat for someone her age which immediately means they’ve strapped a rocket to her back and want her to go far. While my wife doesn’t like her voice, I think this is awesome and she’s got a hell of a career ahead of her.
Raw also got Dean Ambrose and I’m personally excited to see him being featured every week on Raw in a hell of a feud with Miz (Another defect) again. This was sort of seem less transition from Smackdown to Raw and I’m okay with that as it’s likely to reach it’s conclusion at Extreme Rules in a few weeks. The question is who walks out Champion, and as big of a fan of Deans as I am, I’m okay if Miz captures the title as long as they don’t just throw Dean to the side again.
On the Smackdown side, there’s a couple of people who have really came into their own and seemed to be taking their new homes well. Those are Tamina Snuka and Jinder Mahal. Now both of these wrestlers have been featured predominately on Smackdown over the last few weeks. Tamina as part of the “Welcoming Club” Women’s Stable. Quick personal note, if I were booking this, I’d have Charlotte come out as the actual leader of this group and create a women’s four horsemen of sorts. I think that would make this an interesting story and give them a hell of a faction to build around in the women’s division.
Jinder has been the #1 contender for the WWE Championship for quite some time. They’ve been building him up quite a bit and I feel like this is another way for Smackdown to show it’s supiority to Raw. Because we haven’t seen star creation like this on Raw since the split almost a year ago, but Smackdown seems to have pulled itself back from the brink with the creation of Jinder, Elevating Sami, and now adding Tye Dillenger and Shinske Nakamura, personally as a guy who has tickets to see Money in the Bank this year in person, I’m excited to see the field as the event draws closer.
Overall, while the execution of the Shakeup wasn’t great, I have to be honest, so far it has added some differences to the program especially in the women’s division which was something that the product needed for quite some time. It will be interesting to see where they go from here though.
That’s it for this weeks’ edition of “Book It” join me next week as I talk about another one of Smackdowns’ Rising stars Barron Corbin. For now though, I’m Kyle Robinson closing the book on this subject.