SmackDown Live is officially not the house that AJ Styles built anymore. Kofi Kingston’s victory over Styles this week got me thinking that it might be more beneficial to WWE to have him retain his WWE Championship against Randy Orton at SummerSlam.
For a couple of weeks now I have been leaning towards Orton because we know what we will get out of Randy Orton as champion (we’ve seen it 13 times) and it seems like a decent time to put the belt on him because it’s been over two years since he held the WWE Championship. While this is a decent argument, after rethinking it, there is still a little more potential left for WWE to explore with Kingston as champion, for example a feud with Ali, Andrade, or most intriguingly a big clash with Big E, who has serious potential.
I know I have said all along that I didn’t see Kofi holding the title past SummerSlam, but there seems to be too much potential that WWE has yet to be explored with Kingston as champion. Yes, live event attendance is down for events headlined by Kofi Kingston, but I do not believe this is necessarily being caused by him (it was instead poor storytelling which is being addressed and rapidly improved in my opinion).
What is Dolph Ziggler’s obsession with Goldberg because it won’t lead to a potential confrontation or rivalry between the two, at least I wouldn’t imagine. What might be a great rivalry, however, is one between Ziggler and Sami Zayn because Zayn analyzes what’s wrong with everyone but himself from a psychological standpoint, and Ziggler seems to be ignorant of his own psychological issues (in storyline) and says every scenario in which a superstar achieves major success should be him and he makes excuses all the time as to why it’s not him. The Miz confronted him about this topic about a week ago and he dismissed it. Anyway, Zayn has Aleister Black to deal with right now before we get to this, but this will be a great idea for WWE to look into in the future.
Trish Stratus having one last match to finish off her career with Charlotte Flair is a brilliant idea. WWE needs to capitalize on this now while Trish still has decent in-ring ability. This match will also elevate Charlotte Flair and do for her similar to what the match with John Cena did for Roman Reigns.
Ali really impressed this week and is absolutely deserving of taking the Intercontinental Championship off of Shinsuke Nakamura. Audiences have a harder time resonating with Nakamura because he has a little bit of a hard time with the English language. He talks a bit slower because of this, so he cannot get as many words out and therefore connect with the WWE universe as much as some other superstars.