WWE: 10 Things Today's Wrestling Fans Wouldn't Understand About The 90s

8. When Most TV Shows Had Jobber Matches

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAiAr8efbhM Think about what it's like to watch an episode of Raw or Smackdown these days. Raw's a three hour show that usually features seven or eight matches featuring known talent with two or three matches considered main event level matches. Some weeks you might a few great matches. Other weeks just one. It's a formula that we've gotten used to. The same can be said about Smackdown even though it's a two hour show. If you watched an hour long edition of Superstars or even the early days of Raw, most of the time you would get three or four matches featuring a jobber like Barry Horowitz or "Iron" Mike Sharpe. These were what we referred to as squash matches. If you see a squash match on Raw these days, you'll likely see what we saw on this past Monday when a fairly new heel like Alexander Rusev defeated Xavier Woods in about one minute. Woods isn't a jobber like Horowitz or Sharpe, though. He has won matches. Those guys almost never won. Horowitz only got wins as a joke angle when the roster became really thin in the mid 90s. The main event of those one hour shows was usually a competitive match, but it wasn't always the case. Most of the time there was only one match between two top level names and even then it was always obvious who was going to win. Things started to change in the mid 1990s when WWE started doing PPVs every month and when WCW started Nitro in 1995. In other words, they changed because they were forced to. Nobody really knows if it would have happened naturally. It just happened because WWE realized that they had to do it to stay competitive.