The Disturbing Truth Behind WWE Money In The Bank

The Miz did four TV jobs and two pay-per-view jobs before cashing in a briefcase he had held for 127 days. Daniel Bryan lost 16 times on TV, and once on pay-per-view, before his cash in after 165. Two of those matches saw him stare at the lights for, of all people, Sin Cara. Both men obviously enjoyed huge success in the years since, through painstaking graft and accident, respectively. Other performers required the full weight of the WWE machine behind them.

It simply crushed them instead.

Alberto Del Rio was normalised through two televised losses in 28 days, in which he went 50/50 with Kofi Kingston. Dolph Ziggler jobbed 41 times on TV throughout his 267-day stint with the briefcase. Since there are approximately 38 weeks in that span, this amounts to more than one loss per week. The deafening pop Dolph Ziggler received on the post-WrestleMania RAW proved that fans didn’t care—but neither did Vince McMahon, who at this point, through his own fatalistic neglect, had pegged Ziggler as an eternal midcarder. Vince worked himself into a shoot with Ziggler. The rotten, circular thought process was thus:

Award the briefcase to a performer.

Job that performer out ruthlessly, because the briefcase is a make-good.

Don’t make good on the promise of a main event run, because the performer has been stigmatised as a jobber.

Damien Sandow lost to Santino Marella in two minutes flat throughout his 106-day reign, during which he lost 15 times. Again, that is one loss per week, more or less, and Vince by this point had lost all interest. Sandow became the second holder to fail at his title challenge—a stupid premeditated decision for a supposed genius character—and his promising career died a sad death. Even if Sandow wasn’t ever main event-calibre, and he perhaps was not, this mentality both tarred him as a loser and exacerbated a toxic creative process.

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