WWE Opinions: Night of Champions Must Outshine NXT Takeover 2
This past Thursday, WWE NXT, the company’s developmental brand, put on another fantastic live event down at Full Sail University in Florida. It featured a very good match for the NXT Women’s Championship between Charlotte and Bayley as well as a fatal 4-way match for the NXT Championship that involved Adrian Neville, Sami Zayn, Tyson Kidd, and Tyler Breeze, which was fantastic. Fatal 4-way matches are known for being very chaotic, but those four men made it work and told a terrific story throughout.
What has become very obvious for awhile now is that the wrestling product and storylines on WWE NXT have been superior to those on WWE Raw and WWE SmackDown. NXT Takeover 2 only reassured that notion and should put pressure on WWE to make Night of Champions one of the best pay-per-views of 2014.
Royal Rumble, SummerSlam, Survivor Series, and Wrestlemania are positioned as the company’s “A-level” PPVs. The other events haven’t been treated the same, which has drawn criticism from many.
WWE made you want to see SummerSlam last month with the matches they were putting on like Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins, Stephanie McMahon wrestling for the first time in a decade, and seeing if Brock Lesnar could dethrone John Cena for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship. That appeal just isn’t there for Night of Champions because it’s not being treated with the same build-up as the big summer event was.
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Look at the programming since SummerSlam – it has featured lazy and questionable booking over the past month that the IWC has rightfully criticized. From Vince McMahon forcing John Cena to be booked stronger than ever, to the heavily promoted Bellas storylines that’s mostly being done for Total Divas, it’s been a poor month for WWE. Fans will forget about all of this if Night of Champions is a terrific show.
Plenty of WWE Superstars were probably watching NXT Takeover 2 on Thursday and saw what those future stars could do. Shouldn’t the veterans want to one-up them? Shouldn’t they want to prove why they’re being paid all of this money to be in the top wrestling company in the United States?
While the Superstars do need to perform, it will depend on the creative staff as well. They have to make the outcomes of every match on the PPV make sense while also setting up future programming. That’s something that WWE has failed to do because so many times in these “B-level” PPVs, the results of the matches just leaves you with an empty feeling and makes you think “Why am I spending my money on this?” McMahon needs to be thinking with a clear head, too. That is very unlikely to happen, however.
Watching NXT Takeover 2 made fans think “Wow, so this is why I’m paying money for this service.” There were terrific matches, great storytelling, and even better build-ups for new rivalries like Zayn vs. Neville and Sasha Banks being added to the Charlotte-Bayley program. Fans need to be thinking that coming out of Night of Champions and then some in order to exceed WWE NXT’s big event.
Triple H’s product in Florida has been outshining the WWE main roster product for awhile now. If Vince McMahon really wants to top NXT Takeover 2, he’ll turn Night of Champions into one of WWE’s best events of the year.