10 Reasons Why The WWE Brand Extension Was Great

10. Secondary Titles Were More Important

When the brand extension happened, each show had about 40 people on it, give or take. There were guys like The Rock on there that were drafted and soon were gone because of his movie career, but the core group was about 40 men and women on each show. Prior to the brand extension, it was obviously double that. That meant that WWE had to come up with more characters and give those guys low on the totem pole a chance to prove themselves. One of the reasons the Invasion angle was disappointing in 2001 was because they had about 11 regular titles in play for the whole roster on every show. When you split the titles up in half, suddenly they became value again. Raw had the Intercontinental Title, Smackdown had the US Title (not right away), there was even a Cruiserweight Title on Smackdown, there were eventually two sets of Tag Titles and two titles for the women with the Divas Title in play along with the Women's Title. A lot of talented wrestlers held those secondary titles during the brand extension. Maybe it wasn't the golden era of the early 1990s for the IC Title, but it's better than it has been the last few years. Since every wrestler was allowed to be on every show in 2011 it's as if they haven't cared about those titles. Right now they are trying to build them back up. However, we recently saw with Dean Ambrose's awful US Title reign and poor IC Title reigns by others that there's a lack of focus on establishing midcard champions the right way.