I don't watch as much of the current product as I used to. A combination of me finding other things to watch, being drowned in content, not happy with how storylines are going have me just not being excited about WWE right now. With that being said, Hell In A Cell is a show that should deliver. You had enough feuds going in that it actually felt like something you wanted to watch. But after last nights show, I've come to the realization that they frontloaded the show so heavily that it's mirrored what they hated the most: How WCW used to do PPVs.

Let's compare shall we? WCW used to start off PPVs with a match to get the crowd pumped and excited. Usually they would do this with a solid Cruiserweight Title match or a Tag Team match. With stars like Rey Mysterio, Juventud Guerrera, Billy Kidman, Psychosis, Dean Malenko among a bevy of others, they got the crowd hot. Same thing that WWE is doing right now in the forms of their IC title or hot feuds to get the crowd hot as Jeff Hardy V. Randy Orton was brutal and got the crowd hot.

Both companies in their respective times would just frontload with solid and exciting bouts with excellent tag matches or Mid-Upper card title matches. While we didn't have a Mid-card title defended last night, the Tag title match between Dean Ambrose & Seth Rollins Vs. Drew McIntyre and Zigglypuff had the right amount of heat and great action to keep the crowd hot and give us a potential match of the year candidate. Same could be said for Samoa Joe Vs AJ Styles and Becky Lynch Vs. Charlotte Flair. WCW did the same thing in 97-98 with either a WCW/NWO match that would be very competitive or mid-card title bout that left the fans hot and wanting more great action. Sticking with 1998, the Great American Bash with the culmination of Chris Benoit Vs. Booker T's Best Of 7 was fantastic. But both companies forget the saying: It's not how you start, but it's how you finish.

You can look up a lot of WCW PPVs from their peak and find a lot of convoluted and screwy schmozzy finishes to their matches, some of them not involving Hulk Hogan. Those last matches on the card made people realize that the company's big matches don't give any reasonable or meaningful conclusions without some BS happening. Heck, look no further than Starrcade '97 to see a botched 3-count, multiple run-ins, and a finish that had to be retconned on the next Nitro, and that was their biggest PPV of all time. The same thing happened with the Roman Reigns/Braun Strowman HIAC match. We had Foley botch a 3-count, to which Corey Graves wouldn't shut up about for a couple minutes…even though he was correct, multiple run ins, and a super screwy finish where Brock Lesnar beat up Roman and Strowman, giving us the first HIAC match “where there always must be a winner” turns into a No Contest.

This has been a pattern over the past couple years for WWE. The beginning of the show, sometimes the preshow, has the best matches on the card and the last matches or the Main Event turns into an overbooked mess or gets zero attention from the audience because they are dead or are out the door because they expect screwy BS to keep the supposed draw from leaving. Brock Lesnar is the man responsible for a good chunk of this. Overbooked nonsense at Greatest Royal Rumble where he botched a finish and a very screwy finish, a nonsensical finish to his Summerslam match where he should have just put Roman over clean and be done with it, and now this because he doesn't want to look human or weak. His enabler is the man booking the shows, Vince McMahon.

Vince has learned nothing from winning the Monday Night Wars. In 1999-2001, he had it all. Solid midcard matches and Main events that were super exciting. Sure there was some screwy schmozzes at the end, but at least they made sense in a story capacity and were explained the next night that nobody was mad. Nowadays, they have to write a 30 minute long promo to kick off RAW in order to explain anything and even that doesn't cover up for the nonsense, much like how another Vince booked stuff like Spring Stampede 2000 and Bash at the Beach 2000 and spent a long time on Nitro explaining everything to the detriment of the company. This is what we're at now with 4 hour long PPVs with the last 30 minutes not mattering at all. Thanks, Vince. You learned nothing from history or how Brock is slapping you around with his metaphorical dick like what Hogan did after Wrestlemania 6 to get his way. Stop being an enabler and stand up for yourself, otherwise you would have just killed off any shot of getting the future over.