Two Things that went wrong at NXT TakeOver: In Your House

To no one’s surprise, NXT TakeOver: In Your House left most fans satisfied with what they say once the show ended. None of the five matches on the card disappointed from a quality standpoint: all of them lasted the appropriate length, maintained a straightforward story, and delivered a definitive conclusion.

However, this show wasn’t without its errors, which mostly center around some odd choices that didn’t play out in practice the way they likely sounded in theory.

These are the two things WWE got wrong at NXT TakeOver: In Your House.

Karrion Kross’ booking in the main event

Look, I get what the creative team tried to pull off in the Fatal-5-Way main event. They tried to tell a story where Adam Cole, Johnny Gargano, Pete Dunne, and Kyle O’Reilly take out Karrion Kross only for Kross to rise like the Terminator and take them out one at a time.

In theory, this sounds like a great idea. In practice, however, it didn’t click, and it made Kross’ reign feel more uneventful than it already was.

Instead of coming across as a monster who kept taking everyone’s best shot and coming back, these sequences felt like pretenses to keep Kross away from the action while four of the best wrestlers in the world put together one of the best matches of the year. Considering that Kross is, you know, the NXT CHAMPION, him being an ancillary part of most of this match is a problem, especially when you remember that the build for this match centered around how overrated he is. Choking out O’Reilly — the only babyface in the match, by the way — to no reaction didn’t help matters, either.

If you’re already a Kross fan, the storytelling here probably worked for you, but this didn’t do much to win some of his detractors over.

Booking Cameron Grimes to lose the ladder match

Cameron Grimes has been a babyface for less than a week and he’s already suffering at the hands of WWE booking (yes, even NXT is guilty of this). Grimes was arguably the most over wrestler on the show, and the fans in attendance wanted to see him win the Million Dollar Championship…so the bookers of course script the heel, LA Knight, to win.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with a good babyface chase story. In fact, those are often some of the most enthralling wrestling stories. But the whole point of those stories is to make the audience clamor for their favorite to succeed in the end. Judging by the reaction Grimes received, the fans were ready right now, not in a few months when fans come back in full(er) force. Also, do you trust NXT, whose track record with babyfaces has fallen off in recent months, to not mess this up in the interim?

On a show with so many heel wins, seeing Grimes end his pursuit of wanting to emulate Ted DiBiase by winning the Million Dollar Title with the fans behind him would’ve given the crowd a much-needed feel-good moment. Instead, they will have to wait a bit.