Why Drew McIntyre vs. Dolph Ziggler Was Non-Title

I guess that makes sense. This week’s Monday Night Raw was an important show as the television ratings are not doing so well and we are less than a month away from Summerslam. That does not leave a ton of time left to get things ready for one of the biggest shows of the year and WWE has a lot of work left to do. It also explains one of their more questionable moves.

This week’s Monday Night Raw was headlined by Dolph Ziggler vs. Drew McIntyre in an Extreme Rules rematch. This time though the roles would be reversed with McIntyre getting to pick the stipulation instead of Ziggler. In addition the match was going to be non-title, which was a change from the originally announced plans. So why did WWE change course at the last minute?

According to Wrestling Observer Radio, the idea in changing the match to non-title was to allow the focus to shift towards McIntyre vs. Randy Orton. The match was confirmed on this week’s Monday Night Raw with Orton challenging McIntyre earlier in the night and McIntyre accepting later. WWE did not want to have the focus be on Ziggler vs. McIntyre and lose another week of build up.

The other version. Check out both of Ziggler and McIntyre’s matches:

Opinion: I get the idea on this one but the fact that they had this show taped in advance and still felt the need to change things up at the last minute does not exactly bode well for what the company is doing at the moment. It continues their trend of seemingly having no long term plans and that is a really bad sign. Hopefully they can fix things, because that kind of planning could go a long way in helping them out.

Which match did you prefer? How do you see McIntyre vs. Orton going? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his- Amazon author page with 30 wrestling books. Get the latest and greatest in professional wrestling news by signing up for our daily email newsletter. Just look below for “GET EXCLUSIVE UPDATES” to sign up. Thank you for reading!