Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Get Them Off the Bench

Axel wants off the bench; WWE should honor his request
Photo Credit: WWE.com
One of WWE's glaringest weaknesses right now is the variety of its week-to-week cards, or the lack thereof to be more specific. It's not unusual to see wrestlers slated to go against each other on pay-per-view wrestle two, three, even four times on free television before getting the nod on the Network. It has made RAW difficult to sit through, even during the good weeks, and it's been a problem for a long time. It's not like WWE has a small roster with limited matchups. The number of active wrestlers at a given time is pretty big, yet few make television each week. One wrestler at least is sick of "sitting on the bench" as he termed it:

Curtis Axel, at the very least, is a solid hand. He can have good to great matches with a number of opponents up and down the roster. Heath Slater bumps like a maniac and sells exquisitely; you don't think he might make folks look good week in and week out? Zack Ryder, Los Matadores, Adam Rose, Damien Sandow, Jack Swagger, all of them could be on television each week having different matches with different upper-card guys, getting reps, keeping the big PPV matches fresh. Of course, filling the role of the new jobber may not be what Axel meant for himself, but it would be something better than existing in purgatory. He could be on TV and in front of the crowd in important situations so that if and when he is ready to be pushed, he'd have a leg up.

The importance of variety and shaking up ways to tell stories are lost in WWE, and they can be re-found quite easily. All the company has to do is make use of its roster and find new and better ways to extend stories rather than spamming the same matches over and over again. It's a lot harder than it sounds for sure, but you have to start somewhere, right?