Smackdown Workrate Report 3/28/2008

Better get this out of the way before Mania starts....

WHAT WORKED:

-Damn near everything. This was one of the better free TV wrestling shows you'll ever see. But I should probably be a bit more specific.

-Punk vs. Morrison was a nice pocket epic. For a match-up that was once deemed so horrible that Benoit had to be on life support to justify it happening, these two actually work really well with each other now. Punk still feels like he's struggling to find his groove in the WWE. He's getting better, but he gets booked as a "MOVES~!" wrestler, and that's not really what he does best. Well, he has a lot of moves, but he's performing many of them at half-speed. Ideally, he compensates for that by being really charismatic and being a great storyteller and character, but in a match like this that borders on wrestling in a vacuum, he's not gonna do that. Instead, he has Morrison - a much better "moves" wrestler - to compensate for him with his silky-smooth execution of pretty much everything, and both men are psychologically sound enough to hold this together. All in all, a fine hype match for Money in the Bank.

-List of great things so far about the Diva Contests:
1. Sets up awesome, old-school angle
2. Proper use of text message polls
3. Cherry's character development
4. The backstage segment this week where everyone was looking around baffled during the drumroll
Everything else goes below.

-That six-man was totally rockin'. Once again, we get to see Jesse develop into an awesome face-in-peril, and Miz, Cade, and Murdoch bring the assbeat accordingly. Festus totally mauls dudes in the great wild brawl at the end, and Kofi Kingston - who I had never seen before - is totally fine flying around at the end of the match. Also, his theme song is great, which always helps your case with me.

-My wrestling viewing this year has been pretty limited so far, but Jericho vs. MVP is pretty close to being my standing MOTY. This was Jericho's best match since the series with The Rock in '01. He looked totally fine here. His punches were kinda shitty, but he brought great fire to the match, and he had a really nice diving dropkick through the ropes. But really, this is MVP's match. There's a goodly chance 2008 is gonna end up being his year, and this match, along with the Batista matches, shows you why. He's finally struck the balance between "shitty guy who relies totally on luck, cheating, and politicking to get by" and "really talented guy who has serious pro wrestling matches", to become "really talented guy who could probably beat you clean, but is also a lazy, arrogant coward, and thus chooses to take the easy way out whenever possible". In other words, he has become precisely Terrell Owens, which was the whole point of the gimmick in the first place. And well, he's wrestling like a guy who now knows exactly what he's supposed to be doing. He's found a nice formula to fit that character, which he employs here: trying to out-wrestle Jericho (with a very neat mat segment), losing his cool, getting beat on because of that, then regaining his composure and picking his spots, allowing him to control the body of the match, until Jericho makes his comeback and MVP panics again, leading to the finish. It's a pretty standard heel formula, but it's become standard because it works. MVP's "picking his spot to take control" moment in this match is countering Jericho's springboard dropkick to the apron with a big boot, and it's about as nasty as it sounds. This being an MVP match, that boot comes back several times, and each one is great looking and sold like death by Jericho. One while Jericho is kneeling for a great nearfall. Another while Jericho is in the corner, and as MVP pulls his foot off of the ropes, it hooks Jericho's head and drags him down with it. That's another great nearfall, and you really believe this match is going to end with a clean win for MVP. It doesn't, as Jericho counters the Playmaker into the Walls of Jericho. MVP gets the ropes, panics and tries to attack him with the belt, leading to a DQ, but Jericho manages to Codebreak the belt into his face. Then he pulls out a ladder from under the ring, runs MVP over with it, and then then just drops it on him while he's down, and you want to see the Money in the Bank match AND every rematch these two have in singles competition. Awesome.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK:

-I liked the Henry vs. Khali part of the mini-Battle Royal, and a face-turned Henry vs. Chavo could be fun, but I wasn't feeling the rest of this. Palumbo is awesome, but he was gone pretty quick. Kane who has been shockingly okay for the last year or so, seems to be devolving back into his old, shitty self. When you come off as too plodding in a match with Khali, you've done something wrong.

-Batista vs. Snitsky was what it was, which was...well...nothing, really. I guess I could complain about the heroic Batista attack the dude he already beat with a steel chair for no apparent reason, but that doesn't even crack the top 10 of reasons why Batista is a shitty babyface. At least it was short.

-Victoria makes me long for the restrained comedy stylings of Droppo from "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians". When you give the worst performance on a show that has Snitsky on it, you've done something wrong.

-So Edge is this "Ultimate Opportunist", this brilliant, canny tactician whose cunning plans have made him the most powerful force on Smackdown, and who has been able to outsmart The Undertaker at every turn so far, but he couldn't foresee that The Undertaker just might have been hiding in the casket? You know, like he's been doing pretty much every time a casket shows up on WWE programming for the last 18 years? If I've said it once (as I actually have already in this piece), I've said it a million times: just because something is predictable, doesn't mean it's bad. But when you've got a guy like Edge, who's been built up as a genre savvy schemer who's been able to subvert or avert many of his foes' usual tricks, it seems stupid that he wouldn't have seen this coming. Fuck, Jake Roberts figured it out in '92, and then, The Undertaker had only done it two or three times before. Now he's been doing it for 18 years. Stop sleeping, man!