Views From The Turnbuckle: Survivor Series Preview; Can WWE Save One Of The Big Four?

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On paper, Survivor Series has to be one of the lamest PPV cards WWE has ever put on. For the first time in a long time, WWE is promoting a major event without any world title match, any women’s championship match and no tag team title match. Instead WWE is building the event around the “dream” match between Goldberg and Brock Lesnar, as well as the rivalry between SmackDown and RAW. Is that enough to make the PPV very exciting? It is hard to say that it does heading into Sunday.

I already wrote about Goldberg and Lesnar last week so I won’t elaborate that much here. I wouldn’t have very high expectations for the match, after all Goldberg is nearly 50 years old and despite the fact that he appears to be in great shape, he hasn’t wrestled in over a dozen years. However, I think at the very least it will be entertaining as a spectacle. Goldberg has proven during his recent appearances on RAW that the crowd is still really into him; although the historically unpredictable Toronto crowd might react differently. Brock is always going to be over as long as he is destroying people, so at the very least the crowd should be hot for it. WWE has a lot of time to figure out what they want to do with the match so hopefully they have a lot of smoke-and-mirrors to make the match seem better than it actually is. In a lot of ways I think it will be like The Undertaker and Shane McMahon match from WrestleMania where it won’t technically be very good but because the crowd is hot and they will do some cool spots it will come off as a fun match.

But Goldberg vs Lesnar is only one match, the rest of the show is being built around RAW and SmackDown engaging in matches that pit one brand against the other. There are several problems with this concept, but ultimately the issue is that nothing really feels at stake in these matches. I appreciate that they are trying to bring back the importance of the 5-on-5 elimination matches, but at this point unless something really important is on the line it feels like a dated concept. Just two years ago they had a really good traditional Survivor Series match where if The Authority lost they would be out of power. Of course WWE ruined that by having The Authority lose the match only to regain power two weeks later, but the point is the match felt important because something important was actually on the line.

WWE has hyped the SmackDown …

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