Building Challengers

Hi, Scott.


Is the importance of telling a story/building up challengers over time important, or should companies just focus on giving people matches they want to see, even if the challenger comes out of nowhere and doesn’t make much (/kayfabe) sense?

There seemed to be a fair amount of outrage that Balor’s injury scrapped his first planned title defenses against Owens and then Owens and Jericho in a three-way the following month. While the matches would have been good (though Owens might have hurt Balor on promos), why didn’t they do more to build Owens and Jericho as bona fide title challengers than putting them in an (upper)midcard comedy tag team?

Even if post-draft plans weren’t set by Extreme Rules (Owens loses IC title 4-way, Jericho loses to Ambrose) or MITB (both lose MITB match), why not give them wins at Battleground? Instead, Jericho had a talk show segment with Orton, and Owens lost to Zayn, who wasn’t even important enough to make the Summerslam main card. Yes, Enzo and Cass are very popular, but they haven’t even won the tag titles, so it’s not like that is a huge win but was apparently supposed to give Jeri-KO momentum to become title challengers.

Or does it just matter that Owens-Balor would have been a good match, such that building up challengers to be kayfabe credible is a nice extra but not necessary? As long as the story of "Owens vs. Balor" is compelling, maybe it doesn’t matter how Owens got to that point.

Thanks.

​Hey, it’s the Network era, it doesn’t really matter how credible the challengers are, to be honest. Long as you can throw them in a four-way or Beat the Clock match or battle royale on RAW and give them three weeks of build, it really doesn’t matter how much cred they had on the last show if you just want the bare minimum. ​