6 Ups And 9 Downs From WWE No Mercy 2016

4. Swagger On PPV

jack swagger baron corbin
WWE.com

Look, this isn’t supposed to be an unfair jab, but Jack Swagger has no place being on PPV in 2016 as anything more than a job guy. And WWE has no one to blame but itself.

Before he defeated Baron Corbin last week under dubious circumstances, Swagger hadn’t won a match on Raw or SmackDown in 2016. He was barely featured on either show, but when he did compete, he lost. Jinder Mahal defeated Swagger to send him packing to SmackDown last month. So it wasn’t exactly a huge coup for the blue brand when the Real American jumped. And Corbin shouldn’t have been quaking in his boots when Swagger zeroed in on him.

This is emblematic of WWE’s problem these days. You have a talented guy like Swagger, but he’s been a goober who loses so much that no one takes him seriously as a threat. And if he had beaten Corbin out of the blue Sunday, it would have been counter-intuitive to beat a supposed rising star like that.

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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.