It’s a Big Dog Eat Big Dog World

If the joke is that Baron Corbin is the bro-masqeurading-as-metal head dipshit that was at seemingly every college part I went to, then the “singing” segment with he and Elias was money. If not, it was just Alexa Bliss’s “This is Your Life” segment with better outfits and lighting. 

The match itself was, not surprisingly, somewhere between good and nearly the best match of the night. Corbin has turned “random tag match involving Finn Balor” into his own version of Jeff Hardy in a ladder match. Between that and usurping the legacy of wearing the gear for the job you want, not the job you have from the Rotunda boys like so much Irwin R. Shyster, the future for Baron is so bright, he’ll probably need to wear shades. Mostly because it looks like he spends a lot of time in the dark and my assumption is because he has serious issues with light sensitivity.

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Having the Kevin Owens vs. Braun Strowman take place in a steel cage match is a textbook example of building to a premise instead of the stipulation as a way to add heat to a feud. The heat was already there and by forcing Kevin Owens into direct confrontation with his tormentor, Braun — which, in one of the rare cases (in large part because KO is the fucking best) of face bullying is actually in service of his face turn because KO is such an irredeemable, cowardly shithead — is giving the people what they want to see.

It also appears that the WWE is finally figuring out the Attenborough conundrum: how to structure a PPV card in a way that helps to construct a larger narrative out of a relatively disjointed set of stories. Instead of the never ending cavalcade of clusterfucks it usually is, this year’s Extreme Rules only has a handful of matches with non-title-related stipulations: Nia v. Alexa in a No-DQ/Extreme Rules match to presumably end their blood feud, a 30-minute Iron Man match to determine who the better worker is between Seth/Dolph and a cage match between someone (Kevin Owens) who continually tries to run from the person (or “monster in the bank” if you’d prefer)  everyone wants to see catch him.

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