WWE SummerSlam 2018 Was Special, Because It Made Us Excited For The Future

WWE SummerSlam 2018 was the promotion’s best main roster Pay Per View of the year, even just purely from an in-ring story-telling standpoint. But the fact that SummerSlam advanced so many storylines made it feel even more successful. There’s now a great deal of excitement in the air for Raw and SmackDown, and the upcoming feuds for Hell in a Cell feel extremely personal.

What separates the “great” Pay Per Views from the “solid” shows are the takeaways we generate following the event. WWE SummerSlam 2018 featured a handful of great matches, including Samoa Joe vs. AJ Styles, Seth Rollins vs. Dolph Ziggler, and the Triple Threat for the SmackDown Women’s Championship.

The main event, Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns, was an entertaining slugfest with a happy ending, which came as a relief for fans worried that WWE would go in a different direction.

From top to bottom, SummerSlam delivered, and it may have even over-delivered, in the sense that the fans mostly got what they wanted.

The “Demon” Finn Balor came out and squashed Constable Corbin, Ronda Rousey defeated Alexa Bliss with relative ease, and Seth Rollins reclaimed the Intercontinental Championship right after a Dean Ambrose “Dirty Deeds” to Drew McIntyre. Even Kevin Owens’s quick loss to Braun Strowman became justifiable by the end of the Pay Per View.

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Just about all of these matches had satisfying conclusions, and several of them made us hungry for more. A handful of these feuds suddenly feel much more personal, which is exactly the right recipe for a massive match at Hell in a Cell.

For example, Becky Lynch seemingly had Carmella dead-to-rights in the center of the ring, trapped in the Dis-Arm-Her for the second time during the match. Carmella had nowhere to go, and it looked like Becky finally had the SmackDown Women’s Championship one.

Instead, Charlotte Flair was there to swoop in and steal the glory, just as she swooped in weeks earlier to become a part of this match. Flair hit her “best friend” with Natural Selection, pinning Lynch in the middle of the ring and stealing a win from her.

After the match, the two embraced, but Becky finally had enough. She absolutely snapped, beating Charlotte all over the ringside area to cheers, as the crowd will clearly never give up on supporting Becky.

Charlotte and Becky have always had history together, but their two matches on SmackDown Live were just babyface vs. babyface bouts to determine the better competitor. While it seems like WWE has turned Becky heel, regardless of how we want to view it, this feud is undoubtedly personal and one of the most heated in WWE. Assuming they have a match at Hell in a Cell, we could be in for an all-timer.

That’s also how I feel about Samoa Joe vs. AJ Styles, after Styles, too, snapped when Joe told his family at ringside that he would replace AJ as their father. We knew Styles and Joe would bring it inside the ring, and now both men have every reason in the world to tear each other’s heads off at Hell in a Cell.

The animosity between Daniel Bryan and The Miz somehow reached new heights, too, because Miz blatantly cheated to pick up a win over his most hated rival. This is all about The Miz trying to prove to Daniel, once and for all, that he’s the better man in that ring. We all know this isn’t true, but Miz will use every trick in the book to try and convince the world otherwise. If this feud builds to WrestleMania, we’ll be blessed indeed.

Finally, Raw has received a massive upgrade after months of low-quality programming, because we will finally have a week-in, week-out Universal Champion in Roman Reigns. It seemed like even the fans in Brooklyn were happy and relieved that Roman won, and the vast majority of fans on the Internet were happy he won, too. Roman has the respect of the audience as a performer, even if some members of the WWE Universe refuse to show it.

With Reigns as Universal Champion and Seth Rollins as Intercontinental Champion, Raw is finally in good hands. Of course, people will point to a lack of a title for Dean Ambrose as cause for a long-term heel turn that could build into a big program at WrestleMania 35. We’ll see about that. A more pressing question is, what does Braun Strowman do next after missing out on his chance to cash in on Reigns?

The fact that I can write this much about the progression of feuds from SummerSlam – and not even delve into Finn Balor’s huge statement win – is a testament to how good this show was. WWE has put together some good Pay Per Views this year, but they outdid themselves with SummerSlam. When wrestling is good, it’s damn good, and it’s about to kick up a notch over the next several months of programming.