Why Wrestling Tournaments Don't Excite Me

So it’s June, and as is the case in WWE a lot of the time, that means we’re seeing the start of both the King and Queen Of The Ring tournaments. The sixteen entrant tournaments began earlier this week and will run up through Night Of Champions at the end of the month. The winners receive title shots at SummerSlam and that’s all well and good. Well in theory, but there is one problem with the whole thing:

For the most part, wrestling tournaments are pretty boring.

Yeah I know that’s kind of blasphemy among some wrestling fans, but my goodness tournaments have this golden reputation and I do not get it. The idea is simple enough, as you have a field of wrestlers and one winds up standing above them all to win a prize. Ok, cool. And what about the issues that come up with doing that, especially when it comes to winning a title? What issues you may ask? Well that’s what we’re looking at today.

Tournaments Create More Losers Than Winners

Let’s start with one of the biggest issues: tournaments result in a lot of losers. Yeah, that’s the idea behind a tournament, right? One person survives while the rest fall. Ok, cool. So if the winner is a new champion, who are they supposed to defend the title against? The biggest loser? The best wrestler not in the tournament? A rematch against the person they beat in the finals?

All of those options leave you with less than the most interesting field of challengers, as you need to build someone up after the tournament is over to come after the championship. That doesn’t make for the most thrilling time to start the new reign, with the best option often being the new champion defending against someone they have already beaten. How thrilling of a way to keep the momentum going.

Most Tournament Participants Aren't Real Contenders

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6fPNjrsFMc

That’s more with the aftermath though, so what about the tournaments themselves? As we’re seeing at the moment with the King and Queen Of The Ring, you have a lot of people with one thing in common: a pretty clear reality that they aren’t going to win. You look at these big sixteen person fields with a bunch of four way matches to get us down to the final four in a traditional bracket.

The big thing that I see with these brackets, along with most of them, is a bunch of people who have a grand total of no chance of winning. You can pretty easily guess most of the favorites in a majority of tournament fields, which leaves a lot of matches just kind of there. They might be entertaining and better than some other things you’ll see, but it’s kind of hard to get interested in a match between people who have no realistic chance of winning the whole thing.

Looking at this year’s King Of The Ring field, forgive me for not thinking that Damian Priest, Solo Sikoa, Carmelo Hayes, Je’Von Evans, Ricky Saints, or Finn Balor (among others) are going to move on to the main event of SummerSlam. You could list off the same kind of non-winners in the Queen Of The Ring, but we absolutely have to get through those names over the course of a few weeks as well. As usual, I’m sure the matches will be fine, but let me know when we get down to a group of people who have a realistic chance of winning the tournaments.

WWE Has Too Many Concepts That Guarantee Title Shots

Next up we have a bit of a more specific issue with WWE with the current tournaments. As mentioned, the winners go on to the main events of SummerSlam for World Title shots. You mean just like the Royal Rumbles and Elimination Chambers? It comes off like lazy booking, as instead of building up some kind of a personal story, you have a person winning a match and getting the shot as a result. That’s something that works on occasion, but doing it three times (and then double that for the women and men’s edition) makes for a fairly repetitive way to fill out the WrestleMania and SummerSlam cards.

It comes off more as a cheap way to move forward to the main events. I get it every so often, with the Royal Rumble being such a tradition that the idea of changing it almost feels insane. That being said, when you already do the same “win this match and get a title shot” deal twice (which isn’t even considering Money In The Bank, which is the floating version of the same concept), having it a third time is hardly the most inspiring situation in the world. These tournaments will be over by the end of June and will serve as the fifth and sixth guaranteed title shots of the year, or one a month. That’s a bit much, no?

Wrestling Tournaments Aren't Always Bad Though...

Now, are tournaments terrible? No of course not, as you often get some great moments such as very entertaining matches and occasionally a big deal out of the winner moving on to something else (you can probably guess which King Of The Ring moments I’m talking about here). The 1993 King Of The Ring was rather good and some of the Owen Hart Tournaments in AEW have worked well enough, mainly due to the kind of wrestling that you see and the relatively smaller fields.

At the same time though, you have things like the 1995 WWF Tag Team Title tournament or the WrestleMania IV WWF Title tournament, which aren’t exactly the easiest things to sit through. It’s a bunch of dull matches, bad action and of course the latter left Randy Savage without much of a top option to come after the title. Who went after the gold? The One Man Gang, whom Savage beat, and Ted DiBiase, whom Savage…. uh, also beat, only in the finals. How thrilling!

All in all, tournaments are far from the worst thing in the world, but they’re also something that don’t tend to live up to their hype. Tournaments are often viewed as these great ideas that are some kind of epic, amazing moment. That can be the case every so often, but there are so many of them which don’t work or mess up quite a bit of the future, which makes for a less than stellar result.

Unfortunately that’s kind of what we’re seeing again at the moment with the King and Queen Of The Ring tournaments, which very well may be good, but that doesn’t make them thrilling. I’m not thrilled with the idea of seeing the brackets taking over the shows over and over, but it’s that time of the year and as usual, it’s only so interesting. It’s a nice idea on paper, but much like the brackets, that’s not often how it plays out.