10 Reasons Why The WWE Brand Extension Was Great

2. Pay Per Views Felt More Important

This weekend's Payback PPV comes at a time when the WWE product is very stale. They are repeating the top two matches from Extreme Rules and they did a poor job of building up another match to make it seem like a big deal. It just feels like a bunch of midcard matches thrown together. The cool thing about the brand extension in the early days was they had Raw only PPVs, Smackdown only PPVs and then the "big four" PPVs (Royal Rumble, WrestleMania, SummerSlam, Survivor Series) featured wrestlers from both brands. It allowed WWE to build up the storylines over the course of two or three months instead of rushing it. These days, you might see a feud end within four weeks just because of the interaction of people on Raw, Smackdown and maybe main event too. It becomes tiresome. It's not like every WWE PPV in those days were great. There were times when the likes of Mordecai and Kenzo Suzuki were getting PPV matches on Smackdown only shows while Raw had "Hot Lesbian Action" segments as a way to sell a PPV, not that there's anything really wrong with those. It's just that they felt like things that should be on TV. There were a lot of cases where the stories benefited from not being rushed. When they had to build JBL into a main eventer against Eddie Guerrero it took place over a couple of months because it was only once a week. These days, they would throw him into the fire too soon like how they booked Curtis Axel last year. He went from nobody to battling CM Punk and looked out of place because he wasn't believable in the role. A lot of PPVs don't feel special anymore. A big reason for it because they are rushed or the writing team is so busy writing so many shows that they have no way to give a feud room to breathe the right way. Slowing down to tell the stories the right way isn't a bad thing. It's something WWE needs to do again.