10 Most Extreme Rules In WWE History
8. The Championship Scramble Match
Multi-man matches can often suffer from a lack of focus: either everyone’s just waiting around to get their stuff in, or everyone gets their stuff in all at once. The former is slower and clumsier but easier to understand, while the latter is dynamic and frenetic but often incredibly confusing. To make matters worse, multi-man matches where the champion doesn’t have to lose to lose the title tend to devalue that title, not to mention the stories that led to that moment.
A multi-man match that’s not been seen on WWE programming since 2009, the Championship Scramble was a clusterf*ck of a concept, pairing the Royal Rumble’s staggered entrance times, the elimination match’s multiple falls/submissions and the tension and dramatic heft of a game of Pass The Parcel.
The Championship Scramble has a twenty minute time limit. Two men start the match off, with a third being introduced after five minutes, a fourth at the ten-minute mark and a fifth at fifteen minutes. The match then carries on for a further five minutes after all five men are in the ring, with the objective being to have been the last person to have scored a pinfall or submission before the time runs out.
2008’s Unforgiven pay-per-view would see all three world titles held up in Championship Scramble matches, in the gimmick’s debut on WWE programming. Unfortunately, RAW General Manager Mike Adamle made such a spectacular !*$%-up of explaining the above simple rules that no one - including the announcers - fully understood how the match was supposed to work. With time to reflect the next day, some critics claimed that a clearer focus on the rules would help the next time… but even contested properly, the gimmick is hopeless.
Removing the elimination aspect meant that literally none of the falls mattered except the last one. There was no earthly reason for the staggered entry, and the way in which the match worked encouraged people not to bother kicking out, while desperately trying for a fall every second they had, which devalued the whole concept of the pinfall or submission. Not only that, but given that it didn’t matter who you pinned, the low hanging fruit should have been in a constant state of pinfall as the big hitters used them like punching bags.
The Championship Scramble accentuated every negative element of the multi-man match while providing no positives. No wonder it’s been used so rarely.