A crowd pop means very little in the long run. For instance, Chyna made a brief appearance on TNA and got a humongous pop. And yet it did nothing for her or the company other than sound nice on TV for the long haul.
Where Vince is out of touch is that there was no reason why this WM could not have been Lesnar vs. Bryan for the title. That was where the money was going to role in. You had Lesnar, considered to be legitimately the baddest man on the planet that only makes occasional appearances and the crowd perceives him as not all that into wrestling versus this massively over underdog in Daniel Bryan who just came off of horrific injuries that threatened his career.
It was teed up for Vince and he couldn't pull the trigger and in the end they had to get the title off of Lesnar due to all of the writing blunders since the last WrestleMania and they missed out on the big money from a classic storyline so HHH and Steph could get on TV and bore everybody to tears.
YR
I can agree with all of that completely.
I'm not saying this is good for the long run. It was still clear, given where they were going to go with everything, that this worked out well enough for them.
They got the title on the guy they really wanted it on, probably all along, and they were able to do it while getting out of the debacle that came of trying to push Reigns down the people's throat.
The only thing I really don't like is that Sting lost, as that really just makes no sense to me, but it's pretty clear that whole thing was nothing more than a reason for them to bring in a bunch of legendary names and have a big moment.
I'm okay with it but it just wasn't the best way that it could have went.
As far as HHH and Steph....I get that. Totally. I was right there with you about them not more than a year ago. Then they wrote them off TV for two months with that Survivor Series thing and I realized something.
The show absolutely sucked without them there to be hated. There was pretty much no one on the show that pulled any sort of "Man I want them to go away, lose, die" type of reaction from me. It was just...blah.
Now we can blame the writers for that. That's fine. But the writers suck all the time so they didn't suddenly just suck because HHH and Steph were gone.
The fact is that they simply do not have anyone, as lead heels, that are more compelling. It looked like they were going with Bray Wyatt and they lost that chance.
They had that with CM Punk and instead of capitalizing on it they ran him right out of the business.
Now you're left with Rollins, whose good but not enough for me to turn the show on for and....who else is a top heel again?
Thus you need HHH and Steph cause at least they can drive a show from a lead heel standpoint. At least for me anyway.
