8 Ups And 6 Downs From WWE Extreme Rules 2017

1. Bayley’s Fall From Grace

bayley WWE
WWE.com

Can we all acknowledge and agree that WWE has no idea how to book Bayley as a character?

Bayley’s NXT run was a wonderful story arc of a fangirl overcoming her own inhibitions to become champion. Her run in WWE has been an awkward series of stumbles and missteps, with the Huggable One getting too much too soon, then regressing, then progressing, and now Sunday night, regressing again in what amounted to an extended squash match.

The naiveté that should define Bayley surfaced in recent weeks as an inability to “get extreme” to win her Raw Women’s Championship back from Alexa Bliss. On its own, that isn’t a terrible angle, but it’s just a continuation of making Bayley look incompetent after building her up as the face of the women’s division, knocking off Charlotte and retaining and WrestleMania.

It’s backwards booking that feels like WWE either is acknowledging they screwed up initially with Bayley and is trying to reset, or they are just completely lost with her. Either way, Sunday’s defeat basically took all the wind out of Bayley’s sails as a top-flight women’s division competitor, for now at least.

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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.