The 8-Ball 12.02.13: Top 8 Ways to Change Up WWE’s PPV Mix

Approximately every four weeks the WWE holds a pay-per-view extravaganza with the promise that this event is going to be so much better than their weekly programming that it is worth you parting with your hard-earned cash to see it. The problem many times is the PPV cards fail to live up to the hype. First off, Raw and Smackdown run at a pretty high standard. Trying 13 times a year to put on a card wildly better than those programs is tough to do. You could argue Punk vs. Cena on Raw for Cena’s championship shot at Wrestlemania for MOTY. Lower quality weekly television isn’t the answer here, so they’re going to need to push the envelope further when it comes to differentiating the PPVs.

Then you run into the the time pressure. With only four weeks to set up each card, some PPVs are going to be hastily assembled. Finally you get to the issue that PPVs suffer from a certain amount of sameness. When you boil it down most wrestling cards could be called We’re Really Mad at Each Other. As a fan of wrestling I hate to say “it’s just a wrestling card,” but it’s just a wrestling card and sometimes we’re not 100% why it’s mega important that certain wrestlers must fight each other (or why we should care). Sometimes it feels like we’re on a treadmill. Stimpy, say something stupid.

There’s got to be a better way. So I’m shaking the 8-Ball furiously in the hopes that it can come up with something more enticing than what has become the standard wrestling PPV. Yet let’s program the mass-produced, fortune-telling object so that it gives us more specific answers.

1. The Royal Rumble and Money in the Bank work really well because they give a broad portion of the midcard something to do. It’s not just who John Cena is fighting tonight. Championship matches are easy to book. Two (or three or four) guys fight to determine who’s the top dog. Everyone wants to be the champ. Yet what about all the matches before the championship? If we’re just sitting around waiting for one match at the end, our money isn’t being terribly well spent.

2. The problem with Hell in a Cell and Elimination Chamber is that they make those matches feel forced rather than the natural outcropping of the current storylines. I’m going to give TLC a pass on that because it’s always a good time for tables, ladders and chairs … always. If you’re going to push a specific gimmick, make it for more than one match.

3. No stealing from TNA. Too bad because TNA has two ideas that could easily be turned into PPVs. Open Fight Night is mildly brilliant. It’s a great way to start and end feuds. Most of all it introduces some chaos into the mix. A guy can come out of nowhere to challenge for a title or a dormant rivalry can get renewed. Best of all, it’s not complicated. WWE could steal it and call it something like Beef (all right, not that, but the more you say “beef” the funnier the word gets).

And while the 8-Ball generally doesn’t like team wrestling schemes – if anything, the career of Eric Bischoff has proven team wrestling is a generally bad idea – TNA’s World Cup has its merits. It forms strange alliances and gives midcarders a chance to shine. Also, national pride provides an easy reason for the teams to exist. It makes a lot more sense than good guys vs. bad guys, often ignoring past tensions between teammates (seriously, we just saw C.M. Punk and Rey Mysterio shake hands two weeks back – say whaa?). Theoretically, WWE teams could even recruit NXT talent or bring in ringers from outside the company. The E could make both those concepts work, but since TNA’s already doing them the 8-Ball will be forced to leave them on the backburner.

All right, let’s see what the 8-Ball has come up with in terms of mixing up the WWE’s pay-per-view mix.

8. Double Trouble

Maybe the coolest thing that’s happened in the wrestling world this year is the E suddenly has a deep and interesting tag team division. Every week the Rhodes brothers, the Shield, the Usos, the Wyatt Family and the Real Americans are killing it. Toss in Los Matadores and the Prime Time Players and a tag team tournament almost books itself. Put the title up for grabs, maybe have a team or two form especially for the tournament and you’ve got seven matches utilizing 16 guys mostly from your midcard. Add in three championship matches – WWE title, World Heavyweight Championship and Divas title – and you’ve got a PPV that any self-respecting (or even self-loathing) wrestling fan would be happy to buy.

7. Cyber Sunday

Yes, retired PPVs are fair game. Back when Cyber Sunday drew its last breath in 2008, people weren’t completely addicted to their Twitter feeds and there was no WWE App. Interactive has jumped to a whole new level. Fans could real-time broadcast themselves watching the event and then the folks marking out at home could be played simultaneously with the replays of the high spots. They could put together an entire Bloomberg News style news scroll – live tweets, active polls, random factoids. Maybe fans could use an app that allows them to be the announce team for the event and they can download it afterward. If the idea is to get the fans involved at a deeper level, then a revamp of Cyber Sunday would be a great way to do it.

6. Homecoming

Nostalgia sells. People love it when Roddy Piper or Bret Hart or Edge show up for a very special edition of Raw. Novelty acts like the Honky Tonk Man and the Boogeyman can draw a big pop when they make a random appearance. The WWE has this great history to sell, plus the WCW, AWA and ECW history it bought. So build a pay-per-view around it. Have former wrestlers involved in every match as announcers, managers and refs. Bring up old beefs. Have Vader go on a rampage. Give Chris Jericho a big win. Make the big finale a legends lumberjack match. Even fairly recent nostalgia sells. Think of all the bandwidth devoted to speculating when John Morrison, Shelton Benjamin and MVP might be returning to the WWE. Since Goldust returning to the WWE counts as one of the top moments of the year, why not have a match or two where a former superstar tries to win back a spot on the roster. Maybe even make it for a current guy’s spot (if you lose, you’re gone).

5. The People’s Pay-Per-View

I shook the 8-Ball three times on this one and it kept insisting the best way to sell 12 other PPVs is to give one away. Mind you, you wouldn’t give it away. You’d sell the broadcast rights to the highest bidder or put it on the WWE network if that ever happens. In fact, Survivor Series wouldn’t be a bad choice for a free PPV. November is sweeps month in the television industry and the WWE could say making this a free spectacular is its way of thanking its fans. Plus, Survivor Series has almost three decades of history, which gives it a name that could attract back some wayward fans. The event itself certainly could use a shot in the arm since it’s getting a little stale.

Also, just like retailers keep moving up the start of the Christmas shopping season, the WWE could use a free Survivor Series as the unofficial start of the Road to Wrestlemania. They might have done exactly that last week with Randy Orton and John Cena. We’ll have to see if they make this a five-month opera that ends at Wrestlemania (shame on them for dragging it out that long) or a quick feud that dusts off at the Royal Rumble, setting up whatever the big plans are for Wrestlemania (shame on them for not unifying the belts at their biggest show of the year). Either way, if they put more eyeballs on the start of this feud, more people would be invested in it now. It wouldn’t hurt if the WWE used one free big event each year to convince people they were missing something special when the other PPVs roll around.

4. Rock the Ring

Sometimes it’s not all about the wrestling. Part of watching a big spectacle is the spectacle itself. Getting Muhammad Ali and Liberace for Wrestlemania I was a big deal. Wrestling is constantly trying to enter a broader social context. The music industry represents its most direct route. You can throw a wrestling card and concert at the same time. Live bands play wrestlers down to the ring. Wrestling fans get to see their favorites use a whole new entrance for a night. You could even have a battle of the bands go on during a match – amp vs. amp, Scott Pilgrim style. The WWE knows how to do promotion and high production values. It would be a chance to pick up fans who show up for the music and stay for the wrestling. As a side note, some modern act would have to do a number with Cyndi Lauper.

3. King of the Ring

I mentioned KOTR three weeks as a potential vehicle to give Dolph Ziggler a push. It’s one of the WWE’s better star-making vehicles. The beauty of KOTR is it’s a banner that hangs forever. When you win a championship, you’ve got to defend that sucker. The King of the Ring gets to wear a crown, maybe waive a scepter around and bask in the adulation/hatred of the people. It really is good to be the king. As an event, KOTR has the tournament format working for it – seven matches from eight guys working outside of whatever title matches are taking place that night. If a main eventer gets injured then you can feature someone who took a star turn at KOTR to fill the void. It’s fun, sporty and practical. Like a four-door, V6 convertible … or Depens.

2. Submission

If you want to tweak the tournament format a bit, then you could turn it into a submission tournament. The only way to win would be to get your opponent to tap. It’s tailor-made for guys like Daniel Bryan and Alberto Del Rio if they’re not in the main event picture at the moment. And imagine if John Cena got involved. Would he tap for the first time in nearly a decade? Does Super Cena even remember how to tap? That right there is intrigue, and intrigue sells tickets. They could steal the three rope break rule ROH used back when it had its Pure Championship belt. And A.J. could run around locking everyone in the Black Widow (you might be able to sell VIP tickets for that – pay $10,000 and AJ will bend you like a pretzel). Anyway, it would highlight a different kind of wrestling than what we see with the standard WWE PPV, and differentiation is exactly what the WWE needs to achieve with its PPVs.

By the way, yes that is three tournament ideas on this week’s list. Like bow ties and fezzes, tournaments are cool. Vince McMahon is fond of the term “sports entertainment.” Well, a tournament inserts the sports part back into the equation. In the sports world they hold playoff tournaments to determine champions. That’s when the excitement gets ginned up and the world in general pays more attention to what’s happening inside a given sport. The 8-Ball figures the WWE would do well to get back into the tournament business when it wants you to pay extra to watch a wrestling card.

1. International Incident

Recently there was speculation that Summerslam might take place in London next year, because what screams summertime fun more than England? However reports are the E was worried about an afternoon or tape-delayed broadcast so they’re not going to do it. That strikes the 8-Ball as incredibly short-sighted. The WWE has a global audience. If Iron Maiden can sell out stadiums in Argentina at will, then why isn’t the WWE flexing its muscles in front of 100,000 adoring foreigners? Boxing cards often start at outrageous hours in other countries so they can run live in the U.S. (a tradition dating back to the Rumble in the Jungle) and a card that runs in the late afternoon/early evening would put the WWE more squarely in front of that PG audience it covets. There really is no reason why intelligent minds can’t work this out. Booking a major card for an international destination is just about the easiest way to throw an event with a big time feel. International Incident: Rio, International Incident: Tokyo, International Incident: Monterrey. From a business standpoint there’s only so much discretionary spending in Buffalo. Overseas represents the big growth potential for the WWE moving forward. And for those of us back here in the states, it means getting to watch the WWE try to pull off Wrestlemania-like events in other countries. Big card. Big event. Probably worth your money.