WWE: 5 Reasons The Intercontinental Tournament Has Been A Good Thing

4. It Gives Superstars A Narrative Reason To Compete

If Championships have indeed dropped in prominence in the past few years, this is not good for WWE. Any given week, they have a minimum of 6 hours worth of television time to fill. Now, WWE's matches are usually appealing for one of three reasons. Either the match is for a Championship, or it's part of an ongoing feud, or the actual match is expected to be great. If you're really lucky, you get all three in one match. Obviously, not every matchup can be fantastic. So what about feuds and storylines? Lacking these days, because as many members of the IWC will be delighted to tell you lately, the WWE Creative department are not that creative. So there's been matches thrown together with no real thought or effort put in, just for the sake of killing time, and they're often not good (and if they are good, you'll probably see it over and over again until it gets dull, because Creative think they caught lightning in a bottle and can't think of anything else. This is why you saw The Rhodes Brothers vs The Shield every other week for three months last year) For a show that brands itself as "sports entertainment", they tend to be a little bit lax with that last part. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xybim0BORzk The Intercontinental Tournament has helped to combat this in the past few weeks. We have a lot of our directionless guys now in matches who have an actual reason to be fighting each other. You can almost feel the relief from the script writers in WWE, who worry that they'll have another feud flop on their hands (Kofi vs The Miz, Darren Young vs Titus O'Neil, Sheamus vs Christian...). Not everything we see needs to be a blood feud, but there needs to be stakes of some kind to keep the audience's attention. And here, it's simple, a prize up for grabs in the long term, and by the time it rolls around, we're invested in whoever the winner is. It doesn't matter if we've seen RVD and Del Rio before or if they have horrible chemistry, because we won't see it again next week! It also gives feuds a lift. Cesaro and Swagger have a budding feud going on at the minute, which was given a lift last week on Raw when Swagger cost Cesaro the match against RVD and the chance to advance in the tournament dance. Basically, we're all grateful to finally see our competitors actually compete for something.