WWE: 5 most overused booking tropes employed by the company

1. WWE’s use of non-finishes, DQs, countouts, and 50/50 booking

In real sports, there’s a reason why teams that finish with the same amount of wins and losses don’t receive as much fanfare as their more dominant contemporaries. But this fact hasn’t stopped WWE from enacting a booking strategy where wrestlers trade wins back and forth.

Booking wrestlers this way ensures that no one outside of a handful of stars accumulates any momentum with the audience while also watering down the importance of wins and losses — why would the fans care about the consequences of a wrestler winning or losing if they think that said wrestler will simply lose/win the next match?

WWE’s fear of having wrestlers lose also manifests itself in a much worse way: disqualifications, countouts, and other non-finishes.

Not so sound like a broken record (perhaps “scratched CD” would be a slightly less dated way to put that), but this is something that can work in small doses and in the right circumstance. But using it in perpetuity to keep wrestlers from eating a pinfall or tapping out carries the same effects as the win swapping: It conditions the audience to ignore the matches since the result doesn’t matter and further disconnects them from the storyline journey the wrestler is on.

Unfortunately, WWE turning itself into a content mill likely means that these aren’t going away anytime soon, but the promotion will never get out of this creative rut until they start trimming these finishes down.