10 Dumbest WWE Title Changes

Jinder Mahal's WWE Championship defeat to AJ Styles last week was greeted with almost universal applause.

It wasn't to do with reservations about the 'Modern Day Maharaja's standing as a world title holder so much as it was the fact that his losing means we get the chance to see AJ Styles battle Brock Lesnar this Sunday at Survivor Series instead.

For once, WWE put its finger on the pulse of fan opinion and responded accordingly. They deserve just a little bit of credit for that, to be fair, although it doesn't mean that we should forget all the times that they've dropped the ball over the years.

While they can make the right call from time to time, their creative team are also prone to the odd title switch which appears to make absolutely no sense - the most common trope being a much-loved baby-face seeing their reign cut short within mere hours of winning the belt.

Some of these decisions, though perplexing at the time, can make sense with hindsight, but not all of them. In fact, one or two still leave us scratching our heads to this day.

In their defence, John Cena had suffered a nasty pectoral injury on the eve of October 2007's No Mercy. WWE had to completely redraw the pay-per-view line-up at the very last minute, and they succeeded in producing a half-decent show against all the odds.

It's still a mystery, however, why they decided that Randy Orton would be awarded the WWE Championship by Vince McMahon at the kick-off, lose it to Triple H in the opening bout and then - after 'The Game' had fought Umaga in match four - win it back in the Last Man Standing main event.

They could have accomplished the same narrative - Orton emerging as champion after HHH fought one match too far - without Vince gifting him the title for no particular reason. All they really accomplished here was giving both men the opportunity to inflate the numbers that will be read out at their inevitable Hall of Fame inductions a few decades later.

Well, that and reminding us of the time Trips buried his former protege at Unforgiven three years earlier (but we'll be getting to that shortly).