12 Ups And 15 Downs For WWE In 2016

5. Taming Of The Cruiserweights

Kalisto TLC
WWE.com

Last summer’s Cruiserweight Classic opened fans’ eyes to just how much fun wrestling can be, even under the WWE banner. We saw fast-paced, hard-hitting matches that we never got to see on Raw or PPV.

But when WWE brought the Cruiserweight division to Raw, it had been sanitized, toned-down and minimized to the point where it was just smaller wrestlers who got little mic time, minimal character development and shorter time to put on matches that featured moves we saw weekly from Seth Rollins, Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens.

In other words, WWE brass took an awesome idea and screwed it up in a purely WWE way. Hopefully, 205 Live will be out of Vince McMahon and Kevin Dunn’s purview and give the cruiserweights an opportunity to recapture some of that early success.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.