Survivor Series: How Poor Booking Hurts Tradition

With Survivor Series fast approaching, the WWE has just announced there will be a traditional elimination match. The poor planning will cause the traditional pay-per-view to be hurt.

When booking a pay-per-view with a name that is linked to a specific theme, one would assume that the people in charge of booking matches would plan around that? Not only that, but it should be one of the first things you book on the card.

But with less than a week before the Survivor Series is live on the WWE Network and on pay-per-view, the WWE has announced there will be a traditional five-on-five elimination tag team with Survivor Series rules. That’s all we know prior to watching SmackDown and the hope at this point is we won’t see a random booking of 10 superstars who may or may not have some storyline beef from the last six or so months that would make the match understandable to the most minimal of degrees.

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What’s worse is that there were better opportunities available. Not a surprise considering how we’ve seen a lot of poor booking decisions for several months. One great option they could have done early on involved the Undertaker, considering that was how he made his debut back in the 1990 Survivor Series as part of Ted DiBiase’s “Million Dollar Team”

It looked like we would get something like that with the Wyatt Family deciding to attack not only the Deadman after the brutal Hell in a Cell match with Brock Lesnar, but also his brother Kane on the following episode of Raw. While it wouldn’t make sense story wise to have the Brothers of Destruction ask for help in a feud, there was still hope for a Survivor Series tag match despite a four-on-two handicap (it happened in 1990 with Hulk Hogan, Ultimate Warrior and Tito Santana vs. Ted DiBiase, Rick Martel, The Warlord, Hercules and Paul Roma.

As the card stands after the Nov. 16 episode of Raw, we have the Brothers of Destruction vs just two members of the Wyatt Family – and we won’t know until moments before the bell rings. The rest of the card includes the semifinals and finals for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship tournament, as well as a WWE Divas Championship match between Charlotte and Paige.

So far the card would be a good fit for a majority of the other pay-per-view events, this is Survivor Series. Sure, it’s not WrestleMania or the Royal Rumble, but this has been one of the biggest events that has nearly 30 years of history in WWE. Therefore, the decision not to have any hype for a Survivor Series match until a week before the show is inexcusable.

Long gone are the days where the Survivor Series elimination match was the biggest thing booked in the storylines. Part of that you can blame on much of the creative direction having to shift to the 16-man championship tournament. Then again, maybe we’ll see the WWE creative team start developing backup plans.

Next: 5 Debuts Made at Survivor Series

Then again, we’ve seen that doesn’t seem likely either.

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WWE Survivor Series 2015: How Poor Booking Hurts Tradition

By Dean Siemon | Nov 18, 2015