The Heath Slater Drama

One of the stories coming out of the brand split was Heath Slater not ending up on either brand. What would become of Heath Slater? Where would he end up? He has shown up on both Raw and Smackdown over the last few weeks trying to get a contract. He has had various matches and segments during this angle. He has faced Rhyno on Smackdown. He has stood up to Brock Lesnar on Raw. He now finds himself teaming with Rhyno and in the hunt for the Smackdown tag titles.

The WWE is showing how easy it is to make a new Damien Sandow. Sandow was a guy that played an entertaining gimmick. It turned into him standing up for himself against Miz. He got pretty over. And the WWE just fumbled with him and didn't do anything good with him for months, releasing him this year.

This is just a recipe for success you might see in other areas throughout WWE history. Just look at some of the women. Look at the divas. First, you have Sable. She entertained fans through her sex appeal. You eventually had that moment she stood up to Marc Mero, even powerbombing him. Trish Stratus was a woman that entertained with her T&A. She eventually stood up for herself against the McMahons. She became a respectable character, and still flaunted her sex appeal at times. That is pretty much how the WWE tried to create centerpieces during the diva era. Sex appeal will help the women get over, then you work to get them respected, both in terms of their wrestling ability and their overall character.

I don't want to make it sound like Damien Sandow did nothing and deserved to be released. The WWE definitely could have done better with him. No need to push him as a main-eventer, but a solid midcard run would have been nice. Nevertheless, it is no huge tragedy that he was released. He can make something of himself in TNA, if they figure out how to use him right.

Back to Slater. The WWE has created a compelling storyline for a lower-midcarder. He has shown to be entertaining. Standing up to Brock Lesnar was his big moment of respect. He has had other moments where he showed heart. It does all remind me of Sandow.

I do not think the WWE will immediately fumble with Slater. They might eventually fizzle him out for the sake of putting another guy at his level through a similar push, but Slater will still be featured well for now without fans having to riot for him. All the way to the tag titles? I will talk about that more next week when I preview Backlash.

Let me do an aside about Smackdown's viewership this week. It had more than 2.8 million viewers. Not the most for Smackdown in 2016. It didn't get more than Raw this week. Not more than Raw has been averaging during this down year. Nevertheless, still better than I expected. It seems some fans did buy into the hype from Talking Smack last week.

But did the WWE deliver something that would keep the fans coming back? If the fans were hoping to hear that Daniel Bryan would come out of retirement for at least one more match, they got nothing like that. If fans tuned in because they wanted to see if Miz would get a monster push, which I doubt, they were probably disappointed with just Dolph Ziggler coming out. They got a pretty mediocre Smackdown. They got some random guy stripping to his underwear and getting chokeslammed by Kane. That was followed by a mediocre main event between Dean Ambrose and Baron Corbin. That is not a knock at those two, but it just wasn't a big main event, especially after Raw crowned a new Universal Champion the night before. The WWE did not deliver. If they had really planned the whole time to create something big from that Talking Smack segment, they failed to do it. It does look like unexpected hype came up and the WWE couldn't make something great out of it.