10 Ways WWE Can Fix Their Broken Face/Heel Alignment System
4. Let Heels Be Heels
WWE love sullying great matches with contrived, over-booked finishes. Run-ins, distractions, and other shenanigans are commonplace, but outright cheating appears to be a dying art, and that doesn't make any sense.
Screwing babyfaces out of deserved victories and subverting the rules is Heel 101, yet how often do we see WWE's bad guys grab a handful of tights, put their feet on the ropes, hit a low blow, or blast their foe with a weapon?
On a similar note, WWE's heels are rarely allowed to show genuine nastiness between the ropes anymore. The company's go-to 'bad guy' wrestling style involves boatloads of restholds, with the aim of cooling the crowd down before the face's comeback gets them hot again. While wrestlers in other promotions will slap the opposition around, talk an exorbitant amount of trash, and generally treat their opponents like dirt, WWE's heels generate 'heat' with two-minute headlock spots.
In taking these things away, WWE are neutering their villains' ability to get over. The widescale remove of classic heel tactics has created an army of identikit template wrestlers whose work is more likely to put an audience to sleep than fill the building with jeers, with guys like The Miz the exception to the rule.