12 Ups & 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE SmackDown (Jun 25)

4. Phoney First Falls

The big problem with WWE television's newfound abundance of 2-out-of-3 falls bouts is simple: quick first falls aren't realistic in this universe. At all.

While flash pins, submission, and knockouts can happen (and should never be removed from the creative sphere entirely), they're uncommon. The way WWE book and lay out their matches have conditioned the audience into taking them as rarities, as they should be. This means that when such things become the norm so suddenly, as they have in recent weeks, believability bites the dust.

Miz and Elias' first fall lasted roughly a minute. Dolph Ziggler and Kofi Kingston got three in their first and one in their second. Both of these falls would be much, much longer if they were standard bouts, so why, in kayfabe terms, should we accept this as anything close to realistic?

It's a massive, wholesale change to accepted WWE match psychology. It should have been built to, not shoehorned in, but such is life.