Predicting WWE's 9 Champions after WrestleMania 33
Who among these men and women will be champion once WrestleMania ends?
WrestleMania is the biggest show of the year for WWE, which means that they’ll be saving their biggest matches for that event. Their strategy to ensure that the Show of Shows lives up to its name usually encompasses a few obvious things.
You’ll see the Hall of Famers make a brief cameo at ‘Mania itself. There will be several ‘dream matches’ that can only happen once, to sell as many tickets and buys for the show as possible. Lastly, and most importantly, there will be several title matches.
The championship belt is supposed to be the most important thing in a pro wrestling promotion. Whoever wears a division’s belt is to be perceived as the biggest star and the most important person in that class. Sadly, this simple and traditional philosophy has been largely ignored by WWE.
Their philosophy has shifted more towards ageing part-timers that were bigger stars years or even decades ago as the top cash-cows.
When someone like Goldberg, who, prior to Survivor Series, hadn’t wrestled in a major match in 12 years, is closing not only your weekly TV shows, but one of your biggest PPVs of the year, you know that there are major problems with how the current roster is perceived by the power-brokers in the promotion.
The other problem plaguing today’s WWE is that there are a whopping nine championships on the roster. And these are just the actual championship belts.
It doesn’t take into consideration other awards and distinctions, like the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal (whose winner gets a humongous trophy); the Money in the Bank Briefcase winner, and the winners of other various NXT and WWE Network tournaments.
The point here is that WWE has saturated its own product to a point of severe overexposure. There are too many wrestlers, too many shows, and too many belts. Because of this ‘quantity over quality’ approach, we’re likely to see no more than half of WWE’s existing championships appear at WrestleMania 33.
Some will be defended at the event or on the ‘Mania pre-show, while the others, unfortunately, will be left off the card.
With the RAW after WrestleMania acting as the start of the new year for WWE’s storylines, it’ll be important to see who will be champion on that show. This article will figure that out.
WWE Cruiserweight Champion: Neville
The Cruiserweight division has failed to take off like it was meant to. What was pegged initially as a replica of WCW and NJPW’s junior heavyweight divisions of the 1990s has become another Vince McMahon-controlled WWE program where the wrestlers have their abilities toned down significantly.
It’s a terrible shame. Instead of letting these wrestlers perform in the style they’re most comfortable with (or, at least, saving their biggest and most daring moves for the biggest and most important matches), the Cruiserweights are booked in the same way as the Divas were two years ago: thrust into 5-minute nothing matches with little-to-no character development.
It’s almost as if Vince’s touch is corrosive to something that, under Triple H’s booking, was much more enjoyable.
As a result of this disappointing booking, the holder of the Cruiserweight championship doesn’t matter as much as it should. Fans don’t care about the Cruiserweights, and rarely give them any big reactions. This was most obvious during the Rich Swann vs. Neville match at the 2017 Royal Rumble.
Also read: WWE Rumors: Possible WrestleMania 33 lineup
The action was good, the moves interesting, the psychology logical. But the fans did not care about this match one bit; it was the designated bathroom break because the bookers failed in treating the Cruiserweights as something different from everything else on the roster.
Neville as champion is a good thing, but the division around him has been mired in poor feedback from the fans and has generated a negative perception from WWE’s own top brass. They thought that putting the belt on Neville would be a good idea, which it is.
The problem, however, is that not enough time is given to giving the fans a reason to care about the other Cruiserweights (though maybe if they stopped spending ten minutes putting on those awful purple ropes, maybe the Cruiserweights would have more time to connect with the audience).
You can expect Neville to hold onto the belt for the time being. He was brought in for the specific purpose of increasing fan interest in the Cruiserweight division, so for them to put it on someone else wouldn’t make any sense at this time.