WWE Power Rankings: Nov. 17, 2015, Pre-Survivor Series

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Who are this week’s movers and shakers in the Daily DDT WWE Power Rankings?

The semifinals in the WWE World Heavyweight Championship tournament are set. The four remaining contenders are evenly matched, and any one of them could walk away with the belt at Survivor Series.

It’s hard to keep a straight face and type that.

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The wrestling in this tournament has been great. Fantastic, really. We’ve seen a lot of guys step up in the limelight, and there hasn’t been a disappointing match out of the bunch so far. So it stinks that the quality of in-ring performance throughout the tournament has been marred by its utter predictability.

There were some surprises in the first round, yes—Kalisto and Neville going over their opponents were billed as upsets, but in retrospect don’t seem so shocking. In fact, no match result has been shocking; there’s never even been the potential for a shock. If you had shown someone the bracket at the start of the tournament, they very likely would’ve predicted which four wrestlers would make it to Sunday’s semi-finals. And that stinks.

Juxtapose March Madness. There are no evil owners or CEOs calling out, say, Duke, and stacking the odds against Duke’s favor. Nor is Duke coming out before every game talking about how they don’t sell out and how they like to earn things for themselves. Yet, the drama in every game is always present, even if Duke is considered the number one seed.

Why? Because Duke can potentially lose one. People have seen them lose; people have seen plenty of number one seeds lose. It’s real competition, and as a result, even the strongest competitors can occasionally suffer defeat, sometimes to the most unlikely of opponents.

Does losing one game make Duke look like a terrible basketball team? No. They lost, but they’re still a storied franchise. The WWE doesn’t work like that. In the WWE, the best wrestlers win all the time. And if on the off-chance they lose, it’s because someone else cheated (e.g. using a weapon, distracting the ref, holding the tights, etc.).

Wrestling is scripted; we all know that. But you know what else is scripted? TV and film. And every year there are awards that are handed it out to the most captivating, exciting, engaging works of TV and film. Do these shows and films garner so much acclaim because they are about someone who is superior to his adversaries in every which way yet is still pegged as an underdog? No.

So with the WWE we have a product that is scripted like TV and film, yet rooted in the unpredictable drama of athletic competition—the two most-consumed, often most-compelling realms of entertainment merged into one. And, even then, even when they could take the strengths from these combined mediums and leverage them to create what could be the most tense, compelling moments imaginable, we get Superman Punch Spear.

Vent over. On to this week’s WWE Power Rankings.

Note: Daily DDT WWE Power Rankings take into account everything from WWE programming from the past week: Storylines, match quality, championships, and wins and losses are all in play. Performances tracked are based off of Raw, SmackDown, Main Event and other weekly specials, excluding NXT. To be included on this list, a Superstar must be listed on the current WWE.com Superstars roster.

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