8 Ups And 3 Downs From WWE NXT TakeOver: London

Ups...

8. Selling The Women€™s Title Match

 No matter how bad WWE programming is, one thing that always seems to rise above it all is the company€™s video packages for matches and rivalries. The people who put those together tend to do an excellent job at condensing a feud into something that fans that haven€™t followed it can digest and understand. But when the product (and feud) is good, like in NXT, then the packages become even better. In the case of Women€™s Champion Bayley, the video guys used footage of Bayley reading a grade school essay she wrote about become a wrestler (a clip many fans have seen before). But this time, they followed Bayley€™s career arc from being an 11-year-old girl wanting to be a wrestler, to debuting in NXT, to finally overcoming and beating opponents to earn a title shot. The great part came right after she won, as all the challengers who came out of the woodwork €“ Sasha Banks, Alexa Bliss, Eva Marie and Nia Jax €“ trash-talked Bayley and said she wasn€™t deserving of being champion. Then we saw Nia (wo)man-handling Bayley. All of this did a tremendous job in making the current champ feel like a total underdog. That€™s no small feat.
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.