5 Ups And 7 Downs From WWE Payback 2017

6. Jericho… Wins?

chris jericho us title
WWE.com

If you pay attention to external circumstances, you would know that Chris Jericho’s band Fozzy begins touring in a few days. That would seem to have made the outcome of the WWE United States Championship match Sunday night fairly obvious.

But instead, Jericho defeated Kevin Owens after a really good match, capturing the US title for the second time and heading to SmackDown Live from Raw. The question that remains here is… Why? Jericho is going to have to leave WWE, presumably this week. So that means that he will have to lose the title.

There’s a bunch of ways this could shake out – KO demands a rematch Tuesday and obliterates Jericho, someone else challenges Jericho and defeats him, he gets suspended – but it’s baffling to have Owens just lose the title if he’s going to get it back two nights later. If the plan is to have him destroy Y2J on Tuesday, that could have been done while letting him stand tall at Payback too.

It’s an odd decision that gets a tepid “down” for now.

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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.