7 Ups And 10 Downs From WWE Royal Rumble 2017

8. Pinning The Champ

becky naomi nikki
WWE.com

WWE loves to make contenders look strong by having them pin a champion in nontitle matches. It’s their favorite tactic, and it’s aggravating how often they resort to it.

Sunday night, Naomi pinned SmackDown Women’s Champion Alexa Bliss with a split-legged moonsault, winning the six-woman tag match for her team. While it was good to see the returning Naomi get a pinfall – conventional wisdom said that the returning Mickie James would likely get the win – why did it have to be at the champ’s expense?

Bliss already is an undersized, somewhat unlikely champion, and she not only got pinned in a nothing match, she had to be carried out over Natalya’s shoulder. If they wanted to give Naomi a pin, Nattie could have taken it, maybe after a cheap shot from Nikki Bella to further that rivalry. Naomi could have said that that PPV victory justified a title shot.

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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.