6 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (April 24 - Review)

3. Let’s Just Make A New Title!

Triple H
WWE.com

For more than a year, Roman Reigns has hauled around two championship titles: the WWE Championship and the Universal Championship. The conventional wisdom surrounding this decision was that you could (and likely would) always split the titles up again sometime in the future so you’d have two world champions again.

Well, we’ll soon have two world champs again soon, but it won’t be due to Roman giving up a strap. Triple H announced on Monday the creation of a new World Heavyweight Championship, with the first champ being crowned at Night of Champions in Saudi Arabia.

There’s so much to unpack from this terrible announcement: The entire (kayfabe) basis for this was rooted in Roman holding both titles hostage and rarely defending them, which Triple H said wasn’t fair to the fans (he’s not lying). So rather than breaking up the titles or forcing Reigns to defend the straps more often (because he apparently negotiated a deal to not show up and defend the title), they just created a third world title.

We’re supposed to accept that Reigns has carted around two titles on both brands for a year and now will just be shunted off to one show with two titles and WWE will create a new “world” championship out of thin air because they incapable of re-splitting the titles and Roman is all-powerful. This also means one brand will have a workhorse world champ and the other will have a lazy, part-time boss.

Once a new champ is crowned, does that mean Roman is no longer “Undisputed” WWE Universal Champion? Kind of tough to be “undisputed” if there are two world champs.

Advertisement
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.