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contemplativeOnce upon a time, Monday Night Raw and Friday Night Smackdown featured a shared pool of Superstars and championship titles. This continued until WWE (then WWF) bought out WCW. Shortly after that, they featured the “invasion” storyline, in which Shane McMahon had purchased WCW, and Stephanie McMahon had bought out ECW, and the two of them used their new acquisitions to launch a takeover of the WWE. This made for some interesting sub-plots, but it was generally handled rather poorly. Sting has named this period as the reason he never went to WWE. He objected to the way they squashed Booker T, who had clawed and scrapped his way up the ladder to be the last WCW champion; and Sting, ever the WCW Franchise player, took exception to what he rightfully saw as disrespect to his former brand.
One of the more obvious problems with this period was how many titles were running around. There was the WWF & WCW World Heavyweight Title, the United States Title, the Intercontinental Title, The European Title, the Cruiserweight Title, the light heavyweight title, the WCW & WWF Tag Titles, and the WWF & WCW Hardcore titles. If you didn’t have a belt at this point, you probably kind of sucked. Eventually the solved this problem by unifying the WWF titles with their WCW equivalents.
After the invasion, Rick Flair returned to the WWF. Apparently, Stephanie and Shane got the money to buy the other Wrestling brand by selling their WWF shares to Rick Flair, who now owned 50% of the WWF. Rick and Vince started feuding, which became extremely disruptive. To settle their issues, the WWF board of directors created a brand extension. Rick Flair got control of Monday Night Raw and Vince McMahon got control of Friday Night Smackdown. They held a draft wherein the talent pool was split up between the two shows, with the champions being allowed to compete on either (much like the Divas champ & Tag Team champs can now) brand. Eventually, the “undisputed World Title” (you know, the one that Jericho still brags about being the first man to hold?) was split as a result of Brock Lesnar signing an exclusive Smackdown contract. RAW got the WWE championship, and Smackdown got the World Heavyweight title. The rest of the belts soon followed.
This continued for years, until the end of last year, when Triple H took over Vince McMahon’s job (Vince was finally deposed by the board of directors for making decisions that hurt the company, namely his decision to fire Cena). HHH’s first decision was to create the “RAW Supershow” (an incredibly stupid name for a regularly occurring show), which featured Raw and Smackdown superstars. Shortly thereafter, RAW superstars began to bleed over into Smackdown as well. The end result is that you now have the same mess we had during the invasion: too many titles. When every superstar can compete for the WWE or WH Title, they start to lose some of their impact. It made sense when the brands were separate, the WWE Title was the top belt for RAW and the WH title was the brass ring of Smackdown. Now, there’s no clear “top guy” on either show.
Personally, I liked the separation. If it were up to me, I’d call for a new draft, re-separate the shows, and even re-split the tag and women’s titles. RAW would get the WWE, Intercontinental, Divas and WWE Tag titles. Smackdown would get the World Heavyweight, Cruiserweight, United states, World Tag Team and Women’s championships (this could give Smackdown a unique feeling by creating actual divisions that the talent would be resigned to, instead of SD simply being “RAW lite” as it has been for so long).
If this can’t be done, then the titles need to be re-unified. World Heavyweight Championship, United States Championship (because it just makes more sense than World Champ/Intercontinental Champ; doesn’t a title that spans all continent make it a world title?), World Tag Team championship, Women’s championship. Drop “Super Show” from RAW and just acknowledge that you’ve gone back to the old school two shows a week format (not counting NXT, because apparently WWE doesn’t want to. More on that some other time).
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