5 worst title changes in Clash of Champions (and Night of Champions) history
This weekend’s SmackDown Live pay-per-view event, Clash of Champions, is the 11th event in the series of WWE’s annual “every championship will be defended” PPV event. This will be the second time that for a single-branded show (last year it marked the first RAW-only event of the new brand split). Only four titles will be defended, but there’s a long history of good (and bad) title changes during the Night of Champions/Clash of Champions event, and we are going to look at the most ill-advised title changes.
These are the five worst title changes in the first decade of this series of PPV in which all active titles are defended.
#5 Cody Rhodes & Drew McIntyre win Tag Team Turmoil (Night of Champions 2010)
This is less the case of a bad team winning, or even really the wrong team winning if you get to the meat of the issue. The problem was that WWE’s tag team division was terrible in 2010. This match featured the winners and new champions Rhodes & McIntyre, the team that went in as champions the Hart Dynasty (Tyson Kidd & DH Smith), Santino Marella & Vladimir Kozlov, The Usos and Evan Bourne & Mark Henry.
It’s bad enough that the only established team in the division, the unsuccessful defending champions The Hart Dynasty, was handled terribly for their entire run. The team disbanded a short few months later. Their awful story is for another time and place. But they also had Mark Henry and Evan Bourne, who debuted as a team in this match, be the final team eliminated by the winners. Their team ended less than a month later when Bourne went down with a bad ankle injury. Santino and Kozlov were the team who lasted the second longest of all the teams (Usos being first, as they are still around today), and would eventually win the Tag Titles a few months later.
The Usos were babies at the time and had been used very poorly as a team up to that point, as they were heels for the sake of being heels. Apparently, their much-lauded family wasn't being given any respect. It made no sense, and it took a very long time for them to be treated seriously. Finally the winners: Drew and Cody debuted as a tag team two days before this event, won the titles, then lost them in about a month and disbanded almost immediately. Like I said, this was a horror show of a time period for the tag team division in WWE.