10 Reasons Why The WWE Brand Extension Was Great

4. There Were Actually Dream Matches

There are no more dream matches left in WWE. Bold statement? Maybe. A match like Daniel Bryan vs. Brock Lesnar could be considered something like that, but Bryan is still a main eventer on the rise while Lesnar is a part timer who barely shows up. What the brand extension offered was an opportunity for wrestlers to be separated for years at a time before something happened to change things. They had other draft lotteries, there were trades and sometimes people just left because creative would say their contract with one show was up so they could show up to the other one. Sometimes they set them up in intelligent ways by using the Royal Rumble to their advantage. When Kurt Angle and Shawn Michaels interacted at the Royal Rumble in 2005, I was as excited as anybody. They were arguably the two best wrestlers in WWE at the time with Angle as a top heel while Michaels was a top face. Prior to that, they didn't really interact. Michaels was a Raw guy while Angle was on Smackdown. Then Michaels tossed out Angle, so Kurt went back in to attack him and put the Ankle Lock on outside the ring. Suddenly they had a rivalry about who was the better wrestler. The Michaels/Angle match at WrestleMania 21 is one of the best matches in WWE history. Part of the reason it worked so well was because they were kept apart for so many years that when they finally went at it the fans were ridiculously excited for it. It was pro wrestling at its absolute best in terms of how it started, the build over a couple of months and then the exciting action as Angle made him tap out. They actually did something similar a year earlier when they set up Goldberg/Lesnar at the 2004 Rumble that, but that didn't turn out successful at all. That's putting it mildly. Now that every top guy in WWE is on nearly every show, there really aren't that many dream matches left. That was something special about the brand extension era, especially when re-living the Michaels/Angle rivalry and what made it work so well.