7 Ups And 10 Downs From WWE Royal Rumble 2017

3. Lengthy Logjam

rusev sheamus rumble
WWE.com

Whoever booked the Royal Rumble this year clearly forgot about one important feature: avoiding dead space.

From the moment Braun Strowman was eliminated, more than 16 minutes passed before the next elimination. By that time, the ring was full with 13 wrestlers: New Day, Sheamus & Cesaro, Sami Zayn, Rusev, Dean Ambrose, Baron Corbin, Miz, Chris Jericho, Bray Wyatt and Apollo Crews. It was a ridiculously boring period of the match, with very little (if anything) happening and no one standing out.

This is something a smartly booked Rumble avoids like the plague. You let the ring fill up with five or six wrestlers and send someone out who tosses half the field (like Braun Strowman did at #7). What you can’t do is have 10 or 12 guys lying in the corner or on the ropes waiting for the next wrestler to enter the match.

Just an almost unforgivable error after 30 years of Rumbles.

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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.