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| Rollins is doing work with his FCW 15 title |
I think this is a pretty cool idea, if you ask me. For one, it's a match where you're guaranteed to go 15 minutes. If that isn't a promise for giving guys time to really put together something, then I don't know what is. That is, unless they were to strap Eli Cottonwood and have him go against Jackson Andrews in a 10 match series. It also is a sly way of reintroducing the concept of the time limit to the mainstream fan.
Right now, time limits are foreign to your average WWE fan. This really isn't a slam on a mainstream wrestling fan; even life-long WWF/E fans may not really be familiar with matches with time limits outside of ironman matches. However, with the exception of ROH, no other fed right now uses them either. TNA tried to introduce the concept with two matches in 2010 that I remember, one of which led to Samoa Joe nearly shoot choking out Vince Russo over the confusion that ensued from utilizing it ham-handedly. So to say that it's a lost concept in modern wrestling has truth, at least in the mainstream. To find a fed that utilized time limits and time limit draws like a boss, you'd have to go back to WCW, maybe even the pre-WCW JCP-booked NWA feds in the regional days.
Having a title with a continuous time limit attached, even if it is attached to iron man rules, is a good start at reintroducing the concept to a new legion of wrestling fans. With the concept that trains people to expect that a match doesn't go on until the cows come home. The FCW 15 Title segues into a unification match with the Florida Heavyweight Title, and that can segue into bringing back time limits for television tapings. Then, the audience for the WWE's top developmental territory has the idea of a time limit ingrained in their heads. With the inevitability of a WWE network coming down the pike and FCW possibly getting a wider release through said network, maybe more and more within this mythical "WWE Universe" will take notice, and the WWE can bleed it through into the main product.
Of course, this is all just doe-eyed optimism at this point. Steve Keirn, head booker of FCW, is reputed to be more of a "wrestling" booker than an "entertainment" one. Despite the fact that I think WWE has a good in-ring product and only shies away from the term "wrestling" in public as a way of circumventing state athletic commissions and possibly the stigma of being associated with that "dirty" word, I also think that their current band of TV writers don't really use a lot of what worked in wrestling companies before the company "Got the F out". Managers, stables, a midcard... a lot of those things are either forgotten or they're used sparingly or haphazardly.
Then again, one could always dream. For now, I can applaud the decision made by Keirn to introduce the FCW 15 Championship and again put the idea that time limits are important for more than just the most important of events.
Photo Credit: Scott Finkelstein - Please visit his site to view the plentiful amounts of pictures he's taken for DGUSA, ROH and other indie feds: Get Lost Photography
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