First things first: I really love that the WWE is trying to reestablish the Cruiserweight division. Some people feel that relegating them to their own division diminishes the superstars involved, but I disagree. Instead, it gives them something to fight for while establishing themselves with the audience, and allows them to grow and develop into true players for a top Championship. I absolutely loved the Cruiserweight Classic Tournament, considering that presentation to be one of the best things WWE has done in years. However, it’s become clear after the CWC, that WWE truly had no real plan for how to proceed with the Cruiserweight division, and instead fell back into old habits.
Since the cruiserweights made the jump to RAW, we’ve seen a lot of great action, met with a lot of apathy from the live crowds. The reason for this is because most of this action has come in the way of tag team and six-man tag matches, involving competitors that most of the live audience isn’t familiar with, or possibly has never heard of. Basically, WWE decided that they needed to introduce all of the cruiserweights to the world as quickly as possible, and therefore decided the best way to go was to throw as many of them into a single match as possible, while relegating the storytelling to the two people competing for the Championship. If you need a reminder of how poorly this method succeeds, simply go back to last year, and revisit the beginning of the “Divas Revolution”, when Charlotte, Becky Lynch, and Sasha Banks all made their debut on RAW. This influx of female talent into a division dying for a credibility boost should have had a major impact in creating interest from the fans, and creating great matches. However, instead of splitting each of the three newcomers off into meaningful stories with established stars, they were shoehorned into factions, and forced into tag matches where no individual character development was possible. The result, was a rather lackluster response from much of the audience, who were left wondering why there was so much hype about the NXT alumni. It hasn’t been until recently, after the brand split allowed for multiple female stories to be told on each show, and after multiple high-caliber matches by the likes of Banks, Charlotte, Lynch and others, that the Women’s division is considered truly worthwhile, and even still it continues to be a work in progress.
Now, everything takes time, and there is certainly a case to be made that the women have finally benefited after a period of adjustment, but it’s not too much to expect that WWE could have learned a serious lesson from this experience, and applied that knowledge to their handling of the cruiserweights. Rather than throwing Drew Gulak, Tony Nese, Gran Metalik, and others into repeated six-man tag matches, where no feuds or rivalries have spawned as of yet, why couldn’t we have focused on a few of these performers, and gotten them into a program fans could invest in? We didn’t learn anything about the new Cruiserweight Champion Rich Swann until the week of his Championship opportunity, making the entire process feel rushed and out-of-place, which takes away from a talent in Swann who truly deserves his position above the division. Performers like Gulak, Nese, and Cedric Alexander have been on the main roster for almost three months now, and most of the audience knows absolutely nothing about them. Rather than waiting until they draw the next title contender name out of a hat, why not begin establishing backgrounds and characters for these guys now, that way they can begin to build a reputation and a fan base, allowing the powers that be to get a true read on these performers popularity and success?
Many were excited when WWE announced the creation of “205 Live” on the WWE Network, a show focusing exclusively on the cruiserweight division, and I was one of those who were happy, but seemingly unlike many, I also immediately sensed the negative impact of this. While I hoped that “205 Live” would allow for an hour of CWC-esque action on my TV screen every week (something the debut episode did not deliver), I also recognized that this was simply another excuse WWE may utilize to not spend quality time truly developing these talents on the flagship show. It’s become clear that while WWE has over 1.5 million subscribers to the WWE Network, many of them are simply along for the PPV ride, and are not keeping up with the weekly NXT, CWC, or “205 Live” action. Therefore, without sufficient time, and multiple storylines on RAW every week, you will continue to see apathetic reactions to these competitors every week, with the crowd only truly reacting to the high-flying, flashy, high-spots that Mauro Ranallo and Daniel Bryan emphasized do not completely define the Cruiserweight style in 2016. For all of those who were dreaming of seeing Zack Sabre Jr. in WWE, how can you have any faith in his style succeeding after seeing three months of the WWE interpretation of the Cruiserweight Division? Ultimately, for all of the effort WWE has put forth to ridicule WCW for ignoring the talent in their Cruiserweight division years ago, early on (and yes, it’s still early), WWE has this writer feeling like we may eventually be saying the same types of things about the 2016 version of that exciting division.
