WWE: Was WrestleMania 32 or 33 Worse?

WrestleMania 33

Watching WrestleMania 33 felt like a marathon more than a spectacle; it started off as a bit of fun, but by the time you were 2/3 through it, you felt exhausted and begged for it to finally end. This show featured 13 matches, including those on the pre-show. Though the matches on this card did make more sense from a creative standpoint, there were nonetheless many execution flaws that prevented this from being the spectacle it was meant to be.

The Cruiserweight Championship match between Neville vs. Austin Aries was the opening match of the pre-show. This sent a clear message to the audience: to Vince McMahon, that championship wasn’t very important, hence its relegation to the pre-show.

When this match happened live, the stadium was less than half full, further demonstrating its lack of importance. Ironically, this was one of the best matches on the card from a wrestling quality standpoint, which only further shows how little the main roster bookers care about the cruiserweight division.

The Battle Royal reached its own nadir this year, as Mojo Rawley, a jobber with little momentum, won the match following interference from his ‘celebrity’ friend Rob Gronkowski. The shenanigans that followed led to Rawley winning, yet there was no follow-up after WrestleMania whatsoever. In fact, it was the man that Rawley eliminated to win, Jinder Mahal, who got the title push, while Rawley’s win meant absolutely nothing, further devaluing the battle royal as a concept.

The first women’s title match wasn’t ‘bad’, per se. The issue with this match was that it felt…subdued. Three of the four women in this match were among the best women in WWE when this contest happened, yet they showed a fraction of what they’re capable of.

This wasn’t the same Bayley, Sasha or Charlotte from NXT; these were lesser versions of the stand-out wrestlers they had been in NXT. This was a perfect example of the differences between NXT and main roster WWE. The main roster demands wrestlers ‘tone-down’ their athleticism (why, nobody knows for sure), which only aggravates fans because they’ve seen how good these women can be.

Of course, these four women did what they could given the circumstances. Keep in mind that WWE’s writers shot themselves in the foot by changing the build-up so that Bayley defended her title at WrestleMania instead of winning it from a still-undefeated Charlotte in a singles match.

That was a logical, perfect, easy-to-book decision that would’ve made many people happy. Instead, someone decided to go in a completely different direction, which only dampened the excitement when Bayley actually did win.

John Cena and Nikki Bella vs. the Miz & Maryse did not need to happen. From the rumors that have circulated, Cena was convinced by Vince McMahon (who in turn was convinced by Kevin Dunn), to forego his desired match against the Undertaker in favor of this match. Dunn’s apparent interest was to do a proposal storyline instead of the dream match that everyone…everyone wanted to see.

Thus, to make this match work, Vince succumbed to Dunn’s influence and nixed the proposed matches of John Cena vs. the Undertaker and Miz vs. Shinsuke Nakamura for this…which was an above-average match at best, and the proposal has been all but forgotten by WWE’s audience.

This is even more proof that those in the innermost creative circles of WWE are completely disconnected from their core audience, in that they ignore what the average fan would want to see and instead go in the direction that presents what they want to show fans, whether the fans like it or not.

Randy Orton defeated Bray Wyatt for the WWE Championship in a match that’s currently in the running for the Worst Match of the Year. This ten-minute match had very little in-ring action, and is more remembered for the incredibly-bizarre ‘insects appearing in the ring’ nonsense than anything else.

This, like the House of Horrors match that followed it a few months later, was a prime example of abysmal ‘non-traditional wrestling’ that nobody enjoyed in the end. In fact, a lot of people were profoundly disappointed when Wyatt lost because his WWE Championship win was such an enormous moment. He lost it after about a month from a man who only held it for two weeks.

Clearly, there wasn’t any proper forethought in whoever made the decisions surrounding the WWE Championship since January of 2017.

The only good thing about the WrestleMania match between Goldberg and Brock Lesnar was that it was short. This was a match that did not need the Universal Championship around it; these two could’ve fought for bragging rights, or even something else (like a HOF induction) and it would’ve been great.

But WWE decided it was best to make Goldberg champion despite his incredible limitations, which led to one disappointing match after another. Thankfully, Goldberg isn’t likely to wrestle for WWE anytime soon. Despite him being the poster boy for wrestling nostalgia, that shouldn’t ever come at the expense of the main roster, which is what WWE did to Kevin Owens by making Goldberg beat him in less than 30 seconds.

The final match with flaws worth discussing was Roman Reigns vs. the Undertaker. Despite many people not wanting it to happen, Reigns did, in fact, defeat the Undertaker at WrestleMania, becoming one of only two people to have done so.

The match itself was below average in execution, with the in-ring action being slow and disjointed. Reigns botching an attempt at a Tombstone Piledriver reversal and his overall lack of emotion displayed and lack of proper facial expressions, made this match underwhelming.

The only truly emotional part of this segment was the post-match, and that was because fans have far too much respect for the Undertaker to give him anything less. This segment was further worsened by the overall lack of WWE taking advantage of it.

If there wasn’t any indication that the fans truly hated Reigns before this match or in its immediate aftermath, there was plenty to indicate it the following night. Fans hated Reigns so badly they threw angry curses at him, which WWE annoyingly shrugged off by calling those fans ‘non-traditional’ (which is an insult, since these people spend thousands of dollars to attend WWE live, only for their opinions to be valued as less than dirt).

The matches not listed here were ones that didn’t have any true problems, or were executed well enough. But there was another problem that, as mentioned earlier, crippled this show: its length. A seven-hour wrestling show is downright insane. It was so long and so hard to sit through, especially since there wasn’t anything resembling an intermission.

WrestleMania became a chore to sit through, which only worked against the show getting a good reception. Hopefully WWE never does this again and tries to reduce the length of such shows. Alas, since it’s on their network, they can extend it as long as they want, which is only going to alienate people even further.