10 Things WWE Should Borrow From Other Sports
There are other sports?
You probably get tired of your non-wrestling watching friends telling you that WWE is nothing like a real sport (whatever that's supposed to mean) - but they do kind of have a point.
There are fundamental ways in which Vince McMahon's brand of entertainment differs from stuff like boxing and MMA, let alone non-combat sports such as football, tennis and golf. It's not competitive for one thing, and the athletes were sometimes trained in places like Parts Unknown instead of the local leisure centre.
But clearly there are things that other sports have borrowed from WWE over the years. You can't possibly tell us that Conor McGregor came up with that swaggering walk-out strut all by himself, for example, and how about Jose Mourinho's press conference trash-talking? He blatantly stole that from The Rock.
Given all of this unashamed plagiarism on the part of other athletes, we think it's high time that John Cena and co evened the scales by borrowing one or two concepts from the so-called real sporting world. Here are 10 things they might want to look into straight away.
10. No Ad Breaks During Matches
Now obviously the concept of not interrupting a sporting event every two or three minutes with an advert is going to be completely foreign to any fans of the NFL, which is, in itself, essentially a three-hour long commercial.
But the other kind of football shows us that it needn't be this way. The occasional technical failure notwithstanding, coverage of the 'Beautiful Game' never cuts away from the action until the referee blows for the half-time and full-time whistles.
Compare this to WWE, where Raw commentator Michael Cole is regularly having to explain to viewers what went down while they were being sold McDonald's and Coca Cola, and it surely has to be the superior way of doing things.
For God's sake, even Kurt Angle's epic WWE Championship Iron Man match with Brock Lesnar on SmackDown a few years back - arguably the greatest wrestling bout in the history of free TV - featured several cut-aways. Can we not do this, please?