braaaaains
Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown Live: Team Hell No got back together for the first time since 2013. Then on Raw, Dr. Shelby showed up. If The Shield shows up to Extreme Rules wearing swat gear and dog masks, we’ve officially gone back in time. Hey, maybe CM Punk’s there!
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And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown Live for July 3, 2018.
Best: American Dad-Ass
We’ll get to the opening segment in a moment, but first we have to talk about Jeff Hardy becoming America The Monster to defeat The Miz in a United States Championship Open Challenge Match: Independence Day Adjacent Edition.
Structurally, it’s the match you’d expect between these two. Two veterans of WWE Style™ start slowly and build for a little over 15 minutes on a basic heel vs. face dynamic, bolstered by Hardy literally painting his face to look like the American flag on(-ish) the 4th of July. Miz is still learning how to effectively cheat without a crew of people following him around, so he mostly plays it fair until the very end, when he goes for his big gambit: his feet on the ropes. The referee sees it, because he wasn’t exactly subtle about it, and is so upset that he got caught that Hardy’s able to recover, hit a couple of signature moves from the Greatest Hits collection, and win the match. While yeah, I wish this was three minutes of The Miz just Skull-crushing Finale’ing him on loop until his face turned to patriotic paste, this is the match you build and execute when you’ve got Jeff Hardy X The Miz.
I don’t know if we’re ever actually doing it, but now’s a great time to bump The Miz back up to main event status, have him finally be the person to unseat AJ Styles (because God knows Rusev isn’t doing it), and build to Daniel Bryan simultaneously winning the WWE Championship and finally getting his hands on the man who more or less ethically goaded him into coming out of retirement.
Best: Sanity Is Suddenly My Favorite Team
If you need a reason to root for Sanity on the Smackdown main roster, here they are saving us from a pancake eating contest where Byron Saxton dresses as a carnival barker and introduces the New Day in ridiculous fashion just so they can get beaten up. I love the nihilism of these segments sometimes. If they didn’t get attacked as soon as it started, what was the end game? Five minutes of us watching friends eat? It’s not like they win anything. Big E vomiting everywhere? Kofi complaining that he’s going to be shitting food coloring for the next week and a half?
In all seriousness, this is the kind of feud the New Day desperately needs, and one they should’ve gotten into with the Bludgies: going head to heat with a serious, bruiser team that kicks the ever-loving shit out of them until they have to harden up and use the hardened, competitive edge of a veteran team with a 400+ day title reign under their belt. They got a little serious against the Usos and it made for some of the best matches of the year. Then they went back to pancakes and cereal and everything got slow. Now maybe Sanity can light a fire under them competitively, and we can use the colorful wackiness for flavor instead of as every goddamn ingredient. Because nobody on the show should be having good-to-great matches every week more reliably than the New Day.
I just wish they’d tabled Byron, too.
Best, Mostly: Becky’s Still Winning
I’m still not sure if this is going anywhere, but Becky Lynch won another match, this time against Peyton Royce in short order. I added a “mostly” to the “Best” declaration here because I would’ve liked to have seen these two wrestle for more than three minutes, but what there is obviously good, and I like the result. Let’s keep Raw’s mysterious new writer, Perro Callejero Incognito, on Mondays.
Bonus points to Royce for using a familiar NXT signature hold and becoming the Vegemite Dream.
Worst: Using A Match To Set Up Itself
In what might as well be known as Donnie Darko booking, WWE sometimes likes to promote and stage a match, then immediately pull back on it as soon as it starts and fuck up the finish so they can do the exact same match again next week. Sometimes they skip the “pulling back” stuff completely and just repeat it over and over, but here’s a direct example: promoting Asuka vs. James Ellsworth, complete with a Smackdown General Manager making it very clear the match MUST happen, then having Ellsworth just run away so they get counted out and have to do it again. This is not at all similar to what happened Monday, with WWE devoting three hours to promoting Kevin Owens vs. Braun Strowman just to have Owens run away as soon as it started.
We don’t really need promotion for a match like this. The entire point seems to be having Asuka “take out” Ellsworth before her rematch with Carmella at Extreme Rules, allowing her a more fair playing field, and causing Carmella to have to dip deeper into her bag of tricks than the Obvious First One to retain. But they timed it wrong, I guess, so instead of just promoting the match for the Extreme Rules go-home show, they end up having to do it early, so now you have to pull back and fuck up the finish. It’s weird. Why not just do something else this week, and save the match with purpose for when it’d be purposeful? Am I a crazy person?
Don’t answer that, because I am, but we should never have to sit through a bunch of match introductions to not have a match to get us excited to watch next week’s introductions.
Somewhere In The Middle: AJ Styles Title Feuds
I’m glad he’s not getting hit in the balls for a month and a half straight anymore, but I want to be more into AJ Styles title feuds than I am. I think the futility of a Rusev title shot is getting to me. I want to see something unexpected in the title scene that isn’t also super depressing — Jinder Mahal, WWE Champion, I’m looking in your direction; Brock Lesnar, absentee champion, also looking in yours — but I feel like there’s no way it can happen, not in June, not with the grassroots foreign heel who just happens to be so inherently likable and awesome at his job that you can’t boo him.
That said, I like how easy to follow this feud is. The Owens feud was madness. So was the Shane McMahon feud. The Jinder feud felt like one cut scene on loop, and the Nakamura feud felt like a personal middle finger in our faces for being wrestling fans. Here, you’ve got Rusev with a title shot at the upcoming pay-per-view, so his friend Aiden English is trying to “wear down” Styles and make him more vulnerable. That’s immediately shown in the post-match, with Rusev getting the jump on him and Accolading him to Build Momentum® heading into Extreme Rules. Simple, effective, easy to follow, and while it’s not particularly groundbreaking or exciting, it’s also not infuriatingly stupid. We’ll take what we can get.
Best: The GOAT
Similarly we have the Smackdown Tag Team Championship feud, which boils down to, “the Bludgeon Brothers decided to attack Daniel Bryan for some reason, and then Bryan’s old tag team partner who tried to murder him and kidnap his wife and shit stepped in to make the save, because you remember liking this team.” There’s not much to it, but the people involved are working hard to make it good — well, Daniel Bryan is — and the story’s simple and easy enough to follow that no major problems crop up. For example, they acknowledge Bryan and Kane’s iffy history as tag team partners and use is as a reason for Bryan to dip back into his crazy old insecure “goat face” character. It’s fun, and funny, and at least Big Cass isn’t around.
They’ve got a Tag Team Championship match at the pay-per-view and haven’t really “earned” it, so to speak, so one of the division’s top teams, the Usos, speaks up. They get put into a match with Team Hell No to prove or invalidate their point, and they lose after a competitive 12 minutes that shows Bryan and Kane as a top level team actually deserving of a shot on something other than their reputations. It’s built on a surprisingly sturdy foundation.
I guess my only concern from a storyline perspective is that Team Hell No’s reunion seemed to hit a lot of the Greatest Hits right away — hell, even Dr. Shelby showed up on Raw — which in my WWE-trained brain suggests they’re going to remind you why they were great RIGHT AWAY so they can break them up at Extreme Rules or immediately after and feud them. Just a thought. WWE loves its Daniel Bryan vs. Immobile Big Man feuds, apparently.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week
MrV
“I’ll move in to the house that you’ve built” was one of the baddest ass lines I ever heard
troi
please be building to Asuka vs Becky for the title
The Voice of Raisin
“Alexander and Lana are looking for their forever home. They both travel a lot, so they’re looking for a move-in ready home without a lot of repairs close to the airport. Alexander wants an extra bedroom he can use as a reading library, and room for his gym equipment in the basement. Lana wants hardwood floors throughout and a yard for the dogs and kids to run around in someday.
So far, they’ve seen a mid-century modern with carpeting and only three bedrooms, a center hall colonial that’s a 45 minute drive from the nearest airport, and the house that AJ Styles built. It’s time to find out which one they’ll choose…”
Look out, it’s the Hammer Bros! And they’re guarding a P-wing!
Imperfectsbest
With AJ’s thick accent, he should easily be able to destroy English
blacksnakemoan
Fun Fact: Jeff Hardy’s promos count as college credit at the University of Phoenix.
“Kane, why did you come back?”
“Russian interference in the electoral process…”
North99
I thought AJ just never took those gloves off
notJames
The Assassination of Asuka by the Coward Smackdown Live Writers
AshBlue
Next week Asuka better have Ellsworth’s scalp hanging from her coat.
Have you seen this man? Answers to “Andrade” or “Cien.” Last seen defeating Local Talent back in May.
That’s it for this week’s show. Join us next week when Paige forces Asuka and James Ellsworth into therapy, and La Resistance reunites. Or neither of those things? Drop a comment below to let us know what you thought of the show, share the column on social media if you’re a Good Brother, and we’ll see you next week.
