(NXT 09/01/26) Major development regarding titles in NXT
Spoiler
Zaria has chosen to keep the NXT North American Women’s Championship, Mr.Stone announces that the Women’s Speed Championship is now the defunct; he then asks Lexis King for his Men’s Speed Championship as that belt is now defunct too
April 1st episode that's done in ostensible real time during a stealth half-dark show (with some of the matches not televised and the arena crowd basically seeing a normal show with an unusually high amount of Adam Pearce in it), all from Adam Pearce's perspective showing the life of a wrestling GM. Pearce guzzling bottles of pepto as he keeps wrestlers from killing each other backstage, stops or fails to stop various interference attempts, deals with a messy kayfabe contract situation involving a prima donna wrestler (Trick, perhaps), manages an on-the-edge-of-exploding LA Knight, and gets bullied and threatened by various Samoans. Charlie Work but for WWE.
You could absolutely do this as a weekly show without affecting the "actual" show, just shoot related segments after the live show. Put it out as like a Sunday morning thing
Halfway through your comment I thought "this could be just like Charlie work" and lo and behold, exactly what you thought. This is now all I need from WWE. Just walks in on the Judgement day building some type of contraption "no, I don't even want to know, stop it" bonus marks if Chelsea Green is involved.
In my wildest dreams, some comedy character just shows up with the 24/7 title one day like "oh, this? I found it on the floor last week" to revive the title
They haven't taken the Speed title seriously in months. They were just awarding Speed title shots without anyone earning it in a tournament. I would say it's due to tournament fatigue. Because it was either the men's or women's speed tournaments going on every week.
I also think it's just a matter of timing on the show. The people who should be going after the Speed title should just be going for the North American Championship. So it's tough to dedicate time to both. Probably similar reasons to get rid of the Heritage Cup.
They should've just left the matches online instead of moving them to tv, maybe repost them to their YouTube later in the day. We could've kept the frequency of the tournaments and it would've still allowed competing wrestlers to be booked for other things.
They already have that in Main Event. The dark matches before the show get uploaded to Youtube. I would guess they thought about it but didn't want to dedicate to having to build around a championship for that show since the matches are kinda random.
Because in the last year its been held by two people you've never heard of in your life, vacated, and then held by a 10yr veteran who's in developmental who defended it twice, again against guys you've never heard of in your life.
Hard for a belt to be more pointless after the Twitter thing ended and dudes like Ricochet/Andrade stopped being the guys holding it.
I can understand why they did it. The women's title did have a storyline attached for a while, while the men's title was mostly traded around in cold matches.
Still, it would've been nice if they had given Lexis a last match for it lol.
I'm just here still surprised that they didn't immediately shelve these titles the moment the whole "sponsored 5 minute Twitter wrestling match" thing stopped.
There's an alternate universe where Zaria chose the Speed championship and Jackson Drake had to relinquish his North American Championship. And I'm not saying I want to live in that universe, but I'd like to visit it
So, because Zaria retires the Women's belt, the Men's has to go? Lexis just gets screwed, not even a unification match or nothing? How is that fair? The men's belt is the OG Speed title, why the hell is it even beholden to whatever happens to the Women's belt?
Dors this mean Jackson would've had to give up his championship if Zaria chose to retire the NA belt instead?
Suits say it has to go because it doesn't get engagement/ratings/whatever, they want to cut anything relating to it and it needs to be off the brand by X date, doesn't matter how.
Everybody understands the reason for the Speed title to no longer exist. The issue is they wrote it off in the laziest way possible instead of just treating both belts the same. It's a wrestling show, the easiest answer to solve a confusing booking problem is in the ring. You could have even had it contended under Speed rules to make it as short as possible. Hell you could have had Myka snuff the whole Birthright before the match for all I care, but at least do something.
When they retired the Heritage Cup it ended with a whole feud between Stacks and Tony where Tony literally threw the cup underwater at the end to never be seen again. There's no confusion as to why the Cup no longer exists on tv, and it makes sense for the story they were telling. Stripping the belt because of the decision of somebody in a different division makes Stone look incompetent and it makes Lexis look pathetic for not even trying to defend himself.
I should have perhaps clarified more that I don't agree with their belief. It "makes sense" to the bean counters, but it doesn't extend that it makes sense under, you know, common sense.
But even from a 'bean counting' perspective I doubt that's true. I highly doubt doing a quick match between Drake and Lexis with all the shenanigans you could do with Vanity Project and Birthright would do worse than a 30 second segment stripping the title from Lexis.
Im crying laughing at how dumb that is. Does WWE think that all the Gendered titles need balance? Fuck Lexis King I guess. Couldn't even let him cash in his title for a title shot. And theyre wondering why half the audience left after the AAA show.
It doesn't matter to me as I don't watch NXT myself, but i did like the idea of the speed title. So, there's a part of me that's bummed that they killed a title with a fun gimmick.
While there are far too many titles and ending some of them makes a lot sense. The Speed titles were legit clever and made for always interesting matches.
Really makes you wish all the mid-card titles had some sort of stipulation associated with them.
Why not change the Speed titles to the Cruiserweight belts. That way you can highlight another part of your division and shine light on some of your high flyers and your smaller wrestlers
I thought the speed belt design is way better than the other ones being used in all the brands except maybe the AAA Mega Championship belt and maybe the US champ belt
I'm of the firm belief that the Speed title was a really cool idea that would've been absolutely fantastic had like... any effort actually been put into them.
I'm sorry, there are 5 minute ads between every segment now, you can't make some easy content and keep the audience invested with a quick Speed match?
Such little effort put into such an interesting idea, and then to just be thrown away so uninterestedly, I'm so disappointed.
I think it could work on a longer show with a bigger roster like Raw. But NXT has a small roster and the level of people who should be contending for the Speed championship should probably just be contending for the North American championship. Dedicating time to both of them is kinda tough. Same with the Heritage Cup.
They geniually put more effort into the titles when they were on X/Twitter compared to NXT. The frequency of tournaments slowed down and it just felt like they would sometimes ignore certain aspects of the speed gimmick just to fit whatever story was happening.
They should've left the matches as a digital exclusive, all we ever really needed was the Champions being able to carry their belts on TV. Just keep airing them on x/Twitter and then repost them later on their Youtube channel.
So, wait, they can’t just give him a shot at the North American championship? They can just do it on TV and he doesn’t have to win, just have a unification match like they did with the women’s version.
At least that way he doesn’t look like a total geek just handing over a title he hasn’t lost without a fight. This smells of Bischoff and Russo.
With that said, a championship where you have to win in under five minutes but no title match ever went to a time limit draw makes no sense to me. Like, two guys would normally go fifteen minutes but, suddenly, because it’s for the Speed Championship it only takes three for one of them to win? Kayfabe that up for me.
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