Mike Tedesco’s Smackdown Thoughts
December 12, 2014
By: Mike Tedesco of Wrestleview.com
I didn’t really care for the verbal confrontation between John Cena and Seth Rollins to kick off the show. It really was the same promo Cena has been doing for years, as Rollins pointed out. Sometimes I don’t think it’s a great idea to script that your product to remind people that it is repetitive with the same characters on top all the time. Rollins wasn’t bad with his promo, but Cena seemed like he was on autopilot just looking to get out of there and back to the hotel. Also, they got all they needed to accomplish halfway through the segment, so they had to stretch that out a bit and kind of repeat themselves. Nothing new was stated that wasn’t already said, so if you missed this, you missed absolutely nothing.
It was nice to see a vignette air for The Ascension. I liked the war paint they were wearing. Here’s hoping they don’t get jobbed out in their RAW debut like The New Day and Charlotte were recently!
The tag team match with The Usos taking on Cesaro and Tyson Kidd was ok. It never really got a chance to get going because production was more focused on The Miz and Damien Mizdow leaving commentary to talk to Naomi. I must say (and I’m sure I’ll get over this feeling), it isn’t as much fun to watch Cesaro anymore since you know he’s not going to go anywhere as per Vince McMahon’s statement about him last week on the WWE Network. Like I said, I’m sure I’ll get over that feeling eventually, but for now that’s how it is with me at least. As for Naomi, her acting is very, very forced, but at least a tag team feud has some sort of backstory.
The Divas match wasn’t bad — it just didn’t have any heat. It happened, AJ was on commentary doing whatever it is that she does, and that was that.
Big E beating Goldust was just short filler for a match that no one is terribly interested in this coming Sunday. Jack Swagger then beat Titus O’Neil in another piece of filler.
The main event was pretty good, but at certain times it felt like it was long for the sake of being long. Believe it or not, if it were a little shorter it would have been a better match. The ending was great, but the first two segments were kind of boring. That’s what you get when five out of the six men are big guys. It gets to be slow and plodding. Still, the post-match action was a lot of fun, so there’s that.
This episode was taped after they taped Tribute to the Troops the same evening, so it seemed like everyone was just trying to get through this to get back to the hotel. I guess because of that the writers didn’t put too much content on here, so it was rife with a lot of short, inconsequential matches and long video packages. Smackdown has been great the last few weeks (the one beacon of light in WWE aside from NXT), but tonight was definitely an off night. I shudder to think about how the live Smackdown will come off this Tuesday. Production always finds a way to overproduce any live Smackdown. I hope this Tuesday will be the exception.
Bump of the Night: Dolph Ziggler hitting a plancha off the ladder to the outside
Match of the Night: The six-man tag team main event ** 1/4
Final Rating: **
E-Mail – MikeyT817@gmail.com
Twitter – @MikeTedescoWV
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Mike Tedesco is the official recapper of WWE RAW and Smackdown for Wrestleview.com.