The Russ Says...

The jobber battle royal on YouTube to determine who would face U.S. Champion Antonio Cesaro is one of the main problems with WWE today. Let me put it another way: I didn't buy WWE '12 last year, but I did rent it, and when I saw that over half the roster was jobbers, I said forget it. If you still have a copy of WWE No Mercy, you didn't really get to the jobbers on that game until about four or five screens in. Keep in mind, most of the stars in that game were created on 2 hours of TV per week, compared to the 6 to 7 hours they have today plus social media time. The champion and the title are both devalued because of the weak contenders they have for it.

As I predicted the other day, the tag title switch to Kane & Daniel Bryan was pretty obvious once they were put in the main event. Vince loves to book these tag champs with issues, and while they will probably be transitional champions, it still makes no sense to kill the Prime Time Players' momentum after they continued to be pushed after the Brian Jossie firing. Triple H is supposedly refocusing on the tag division, but this doesn't really look like it.


Above all, the biggest disappointment of the night was CM Punk's first main event of 2012 as WWE Champion. I've always found that the double-pin to be a contrived finish that doesn't help either guy (except for maybe a super-hot heel) and it definitely doesn't provide any satisfaction to the fans or to storylines. There no match on this card that was a selling point for Night of Champions except (maybe) to see what happened in the tag match and then definitely the Punk/Cena match. The match was awesome, but the finish totally sucked.

Overall, the rest of the show was pretty forgettable and comparable to anything you could have seen on free TV. The return of JBL to fill in for Jerry Lawler is a welcome breath of fresh air, and hopefully between reporting on Lawler's collapse and his new broadcast partner, this will signal the end of the Michael Cole "heel" era for good. That may have been the only bright spot on what was a pretty abysmal PPV.

PPV Price $55 (in HD).
PPV Value (with the "kissing your sister" finish) $15