5 Ups And 6 Downs From WWE TLC 2016

AJ scales to new heights while Ellsworth comes out of his shell.

AJ Styles

WWE.com§

WWE has entered that strange phase of the wrestling season where we’ve had our last “Big Four” PPV of the year and it’s close enough to start talking about the beginning of the Road to WrestleMania (read: Royal Rumble), but we still have to slog through two more PPVs in December.

One of those PPVs, TLC, came to us Sunday night, a SmackDown-only event that featured four specialty matches built up because it’s December, not because the feuds called for these types of matches. So, because it’s TLC time, we needed a chairs match, a tables match, a ladder match and a TLC match.

Don’t get it wrong: Even with the criticisms leveled in this column, TLC was a decent event with some really nice action and moments. But much like so many WWE PPVs, it will be largely forgotten in a month. We did see two new champs crowned, and two titles defended. And we saw a couple grudges (hopefully) settled.

All in all, it was a tidy (if short) six-match event that felt more like a super-charged episode of SmackDown than a PPV, just with tables, ladders and chairs.

So what climbed the ladder and what went crashing through a table? Let’s get to it…

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fortunately became a fan in time for WrestleMania III and came back as a fan after a long high school hiatus before WM XIV. Monday nights in the Carlson household are reserved for viewing Raw -- for better or worse.