Has WWE Reached Pay-Per-View Overload?

I’m not really excited for Battleground this Sunday. I mean, I should be to an extent. There’s quite a few matches on the card that I’m intrigued by like Baron Corbin vs Shinsuke Nakamura or the Women’s Number One Contender’s match. My lack of enthusiasm isn’t caused by the Punjabi Prison match even. When it comes to that match, I would like to think that God invented the fast forward button for a reason. Honestly, my lack of enthusiasm comes down to burnout. It was just a week and a half ago that I was watching Roman Reigns commit vehicular manslaughter and Samoa Joe slamming Brock Lesnar through an announce table. It’s hard to feel the same enthusiasm for this Pay-Per-View after that amazing show. On top of that, it means another coming week where four nights in a row will be filled with WWE action. I never miss an episode of Raw, Smackdown, or NXT meaning that on Pay-Per-View weekends, I am committing to watching nine hours of wrestling over the week, ten if I find the energy for 205 Live. That’s a lot, even for the most avid wrestling fan. It got me thinking whether or not the Pay-Per-View every other week system was working for WWE. Is the product better and are fans enjoying it more with this new content explosion? On the other hand, could WWE be losing viewership on some of their programs, especially extraneous shows like 205 Live, NXT, or even the recently canceled Talking Smack, because of wearing people out with too many Pay-Per-View events? I ended up deciding to look up all the Pay-Per-Views WWE has put on after the brand split to see if they were worth the risk of viewers on their lesser programs due to burning fans out.

After looking over all the events, I came to an easy conclusion. The increased number of Pay-Per-Views haven’t been worth it. A lot of these shows, despite usually having a solid main event, ended up with lackluster middle card filler matches. Take the most egregious offender in my eyes, this past years’ Elimination Chamber, as an example. The Elimination Chamber match itself was far worthy of a Pay-Per-View main event with a thrilling Bray Wyatt WWE title win. Unfortunately, most of the other matches on the card were in no way Pay-Per-View worthy. I think everyone would agree that a handicap match between Apollo Crews and Kalisto vs Dolph Ziggler deserved to be on a Smackdown show before a Pay-Per-View. The same can be said for Randy Orton vs Luke Harper which, if my memory serves me right, was actually competed on Smackdown several times before and after. If you need an example that’s even more recent, take a look at Extreme Rules last month. The show featured a twenty minute match between Dean Ambrose and The Miz. Those two fought each other, and somehow continue to fight each other, on Raw every week. There was also a completely pointless mixed tag match with Sasha Banks and Rich Swann teaming to beat Noam Dar and Alicia Fox. That’s not even mentioning what I feel is the worst part about this show. Only three of the seven matches on the show total, counting preshow, actually were extreme in any way and one of those matches only lasted five minutes! To me, these two shows are prove enough alone to question WWE’s reasoning for putting on an excessive number of Pay-Per-View events.

There’s another point I want to make about the Extreme Rules show as well though. The main event, a hotly contested Fatal Five-Way for the Number One Contender for the Universal Championship, would have been much better served on an episode of Raw. It’s been awhile since a match with major stakes for the main championship of a brand has been contested on one of WWE’s weekly programs. The last two I can think of, Jinder Mahal’s Number One Contender’s match win and the Monday Night Raw in which Triple H betrayed Seth Rollins, felt like ages ago. If there were any shows that have occurred for those brands with major WWE or Universal title stakes then they weren’t memorable enough for me. That feels like a problem. WWE should be promoting their weekly programs with numerous memorable matches for their primary titles in order to get eyes to tune in. I’m not even suggesting WWE puts on as many title matches as GFW/Impact Wrestling. I just think it would provide for a nice bump in ratings if every three months or so, each brand could put their biggest title on the line in the main event in order to get some eyes on the product. Get Brock Lesnar out there even. It wouldn’t ruin any big match mystique for him if they truly built these matches up. That way, it allows for WWE to see some actual value from their main events while also not making the audience feel ripped off by a lack of big matches on the show besides the aforementioned main event. Maybe it’s just the dream of a weary wrestling fan but, that seems like a far more logic system than the current two times a month Pay-Per-View sprint.