Match Length ≠ Match Quality

There's a certain mindset out there that a match can't be good if it's less than a certain amount of time. While it's true in some cases that a match needs to be given a proper amount of time, not everything has to meet some mythical threshhold of time in order to be considered "good". It's true I said that they didn't give Evan Bourne and Jack Swagger enough time last night, but within the context of that match, they probably could have used a few more minutes. It felt like the two just traded a few spots, had a pretty good finish tacked on and that was it. It felt like it could have been fleshed out a bit more, that if Swagger was going to strongman his way to victory after a flurry of offense on Bourne, he should have had a few more minutes of high-impact offense.

However, they had a match during Beat the Clock and then another one after that that were both short, but once again, worked with the time given. In the first match, we saw Swagger cruising to a win until Bourne shocked him out of nowhere with the flash pin, ruining Swagger's chances at facing Randy Orton at SummerSlam. The next match they had, Swagger was piiissed and worked a glorified squash on Bourne, which was a cog in Swagger's short-lived and ill-fated feud with MVP. Neither match needed to be long, but both matches were great and put across what they needed to put across.

Economy of time is a wonderful thing when it comes to wrestling. If you can tell a story and leave the audience wowed in 15 minutes instead of 30, or even 5 instead of 15, it will leave a more salient mark on the viewer, and as a bonus, it leaves more time for other things on the show, stuff like promos, other matches or brawling-type angles.

And besides, nothing is worse than a match that drags on for far too long. For example, the awful Rosa Mendes/Mickie James match from last night. Mickie is awesome, but she's not to the point where she can carry a stiff like Mendes to a watchable match, especially when Mendes is blowing spot after spot. After the first flub, they should have called an audible and just ended the match right there. But since Mickie probably isn't savvy enough to do that, it just dragged on according to script. And dragged on some more. And kept dragging and dragging until the point where it felt like a weight was lifted off the collective shoulders of the audience and viewing public at home.

The best thing to ask yourself after a match is whether you were satisfied with it. If you were, odds are it probably didn't need more time. While it's nice to have PPV-quality matches on free TV, and while the WWE does give them to us more often than people realize, it's nice to see a good short match that advances something and keeps the audience on its toes.