4 Ups And 9 Downs From WWE Elimination Chamber 2020

2. Worst Pre-Mania PPV?

Shayna Baszler WrestleMania
WWE.com

The PPVs between Royal Rumble and WrestleMania have been crapshoots at best in recent years, but if ever there was a clear-as-day example of why things need to change, Sunday’s Elimination Chamber was it.

Sunday’s event was just wholly disappointing. You can start and end with the main event, a chamber match with a foregone conclusion that then turned around and wasn’t even remotely entertaining. Even as a squash for Shayna Baszler, it was boring and dull, not awe-inspiring.

The undercard was full of underperforming matches that were solid at best, inoffensive and uninspiring for the most part, and flat-out bad at worst. This was also a PPV without any of the four men’s and women’s world champions or either male WrestleMania challenger, meaning it was the very definition of a B-show PPV.

Seriously, WWE needs to rethink this last PPV before Mania. One idea kicked around that has merit: Do the all-women’s Evolution PPV here and possibly stick the women’s Royal Rumble there rather than doing two hour-long matches in January. Even if you didn’t, a shorter Evolution PPV would at least change focus and give the women a platform show in the lead-up to WrestleMania.

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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.