6 Ups And 4 Downs From WWE Night Of Champions 2023

DOWNS…

4. Curtain-Jerking World Title

Seth Rollins AJ Styles
WWE.com

From the moment the new World Heavyweight Championship was announced, it has carried the stigma of being a secondary (maybe even tertiary?) world title in WWE.

Afterall, the other men’s world champion in the company just celebrated 1,000 days holding a world title, and the new championship was necessitated (both in storyline and in reality) because Roman Reigns has held both titles, defended them infrequently and shows no signs of losing them.

So you’ve got a new world title created for “everyone else,” how could that not feel like a consolation prize for its eventual winner? Then you throw in the 12-man title tournament being a rushed one-week affair to give us our AJ Styles/Seth Rollins final and a build conducted mainly through a pre-recorded interview spread over two weeks because Rollins was filming a movie. Then add in that this new world champion was determined in the opening match of the show rather than closing a PLE.

The World Heavyweight Championship was starting with a deficit the moment it was created as a third active world title in WWE. That hole has only gotten deeper since then.

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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.