Hi everybody. I’m Joel Leonard and even with Vince McMahon no longer in charge of WWE, were going to stick with calling this column, No Chance. Speaking of Vince, how has his replacement done on the first week of the job? Lets take a look shall we?
Last week, we ended the show with Triple H telling us that the board of directors had lost faith in Vince’s ability to run the company. While we knew that this mostly meant that Cena would be fired this new boss was a chance for the WWE to fix a lot of long standing errors in their programming. Errors like what you ask? How about errors like putting Michael Cole in three PPV matches or for that matter ever putting Cole in the ring at all? That would be a great change for Triple H to make. So what does he do his first night back? Put Cole in the ring again. I want Zack Ryder to have more ring time as much as the next guy but if Cole matches are the cost of seeing Ryder some more, then the cost is too high.
What other “game” changers has Triple H put into effect? (Get it? Game changers?… Cause… He’s Triple H… And The Game… Moving on) well we learned that next week we’re getting another Diva’s Battle Royale for number-one contender. Again, these are not exactly exciting, uncharted waters for our new head of the WWE to be heading into. I’ll give him the return of JR, but with JR back all the time a few months ago to help call the Old King/Cole feud, the return didn’t feel as triumphant as it could have been. And what was this about Morrison getting resigned? Its not he got fired or anything. Does every injured superstar have to get “resigned†before returning? By that train of logic, wouldn’t that mean that Undertaker technically isn’t a WWE superstar right now? Besides we got a package video about Morrison coming back while Vince was still in charge so if anybody gets credit for his return, shouldn’t it be Vince instead of Triple H?
In fact the only real big announcement that Triple H brought out for his first night in charge of Raw, was two championship matches in a single night. (We’ll get to Punk’s return in a moment) This is not the kind of change that I want to see. The whole thing ended up with Rey looking bad because he ended up loosing the belt in less than two hours, Miz looking bad because he not only lost but didn’t wear out Rey enough for him not to have another match, and Cena looking bad because he took advantage of a weakened champion making him defend his freshly won title just 90 minutes later. Not something that your main face should be doing (at least Randy had the decency to wait five days)
All things considered, if this is how it’s going to be, I think I’d rather have Vince in charge again.
As a side concern I’ve been a bit worried about the future of the Crazy Truth character. While the heel turn has made me care more about Truth than I ever expected to, the character has seemed to flounder since the end of his (approximately) week and a half feud with Cena. There’s only so many times we can hear the word conspiracy before we lose interest in what it might be. Truth is going to have to start going into detail on this conspiracy of his, or maybe introduce us to the invisible friend (now friends) he is always talking to on the way to the ring, or maybe find some brand new, special way to show us just how crazy he really is. However the return of The other John (Morrison) will more than likely give Crazy Truth a whole new feud to have. Unlike Undertaker and Kane, it seems that Morrison actually remembered which superstar took him out several weeks and understandably want to rectify the situation through a long drawn out feud. Both Morrison and Crazy Truth have been just shy of main event status for some time now and hopefully this new feud will put at least one of them over enough to break all the way into the main event scene.
And I think it’s obvious that we need to take some time to acknowledge the triumphant return of CM Punk. I’ll admit that I didn’t expect him to be on WWE TV for a bit longer (maybe until SummerSlam) but I’m glass to have him back If only to limit the amount of time we’re going to have to put up with this whole two champions business. While I’m sure we all would have loved another extended promo from Punk, the final image of two champions holding the same belt in each others faces, was a great way to wordlessly tease the hopefully epic feud that is about to take place. For an ending shot like that, I can wait a week to hear Punk speak again.
Unrelated thought: If we have two champions now does that mean that Del Rio can cash in on either one of them? And if he cashes in, doesn’t that make him the automatic Champion in the eyes of the WWE? So what about the other belt carrier? Does this mean that Del Rio would have to fight him two? Maybe Del Rio should get another briefcase.
