5 Major Mistakes WWE Made With The Superstar Shake-up
Aha Shake Heartbreak
The 'Superstar Shake-up' represents one of WWE's least jarring linguistic quirks. Whilst "building momentum" "creates separation" between one's self and sanity, the rebadged draft actually kicks open a few declarative doors.
At home with the fun of a pun, cups runneth over with possible wordplays thanks to the prevalence of 'Shake' in the history of pop culture. Others on this site and elsewhere will have made lemonade with Raw's lemons and chicken salad from Miz' exceptional turn as SmackDown Live!'s newest chickensh*t - the Superstar Shake-up is indeed kind to the layman lexicographer.
It's supposed to be nice to the performers too.
It seems safe to presume with relative assurance (the only true assurance in 2018) that Shelton Benjamin won't be headlining a pay-per-view in the near future, but even he got some microphone time before re-announcing himself as a singles star with a choice contest against Jeff Hardy. He lost his partner Chad Gable to Raw via a post-show announcement on WWE.com - a fairly clear indication that WWE are making some of this up as they go along.
Maybe that's why they were in some cases so negligent? SmackDown Live! looks on paper to house one of the most talent-heavy rosters in recent history, whilst Raw's bloat wasn't reduced by taking the blue brand's scraps 24 hours earlier.
Perhaps the company booked the entire thing to vindicate Triple H's pre-WrestleMania remarks about Kurt Angle being an 'idiot'. It would at least offer some storyline justification for some fairly significant slip-ups.
5. Redistribution Of Dearth
The undercard quotient on both Raw and SmackDown Live! was worryingly high before this year's Superstar Shake-up. Few performers these days are permitted to breakout stars on their own steam as it is. Lower card performers are invariably booked as struggling losers.
In certain cases though, it's an understandable and necessary evil of having such large rosters, and one of the reasons why such these annual switch-arounds are a necessity in the separate brands era.
Unfortunately, most of the rank-and-file jumped with little or no fanfare, suggesting that they'll take up exactly the same talent enhancement role but on a different night of the week.
Did you give a sh*t that The Ascension moved to Raw? Did you even notice that Karl Anderson and Luke Gallows went in the opposite direction? R-Truth was probably only in Wednesday discussions due to a bizarre oversell from The New Day that seemed intent on teasing Hulk Hogan before revealing the shambling fool to engage in some lame handshake craic with Tye Dillinger.
In hindsight, less was probably more on the lower rungs of the ladder. Make changes, sure, but 19 and 17 switches on Raw and SmackDown Live! respectively seemed unnecessarily high as it was happening. Halving the number of journeymen travellers could have calmed that down.