Instant Reaction - WWE Night of Champions PPV
By Ben Tucker, PWTorch TV specialist (@BTuckerTorch)

Overall Score - 5.5

Night of Champions 2014 will be remembered by the phrase, "If a tree falls in a forest and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound?" Despite several solid matches, memorable spots, and title changes, Sunday's pay-per-view felt utterly meaningless because the product itself is as lifeless as a marionette doll. Great moves don't make wrestling good; great stories do. And if there's no reason to care about the product, any given event is dead on arrival.

The best aspect of tonight's program was the Seth Rollins-Dean Ambrose confrontation. Why? The crowd were given a reason to care. Rollins acted like a jerk. The crowd were waiting for someone to shut him up. Who better than the man he took out of action a month ago? A simple story with fantastic results. The crowd was more into this one portion of the show than any match on the card. Why? Because good stories drive the product.

On the other end of the spectrum was the Intercontinental Championship match. Dolph Ziggler and The Miz competed for a championship that means nothing because we haven't been told that it means something. According to WWE storytelling, this was a battle about having pretend stunt doubles. There just happened to be a shiny gold trophy on the line, too. And two members of a band that had no storyline business being on the program. The title change meant nothing.

The Divas Championship match? It meant nothing. The action was solid, the three Divas wrestled much better than expected, and at the same time, the title was the least important piece of the puzzle. Crammed into the story was a convoluted mess surrounding pseudo-lesbian interaction and a woman who's out to get her sister. Who wasn't in the match and didn't play into the finish.

John Cena and Brock Lesnar's match was fine, but I thought the story once again managed to make everything feel inconsequential. At the end of the night, Lesnar's still champion, Cena remains the rightful number one contender, and Seth Rollins has the Money in the Bank briefcase. You paid $9.99 for the WWE Network to watch the product spin its wheels. Congratulations.

The rest of the show followed the same format. Solid-to-pretty good matches with incredibly weak stories behind them, resulting in middling enjoyment. Not a single contest was disappointing (other than potentially Orton-Jericho, which moved at a slower pace than a bird with clipped wings). But without any worthwhile stories it would have to take consistently amazing matches to make the program feel worthwhile. And instead we watched a glorified Raw.

WWE's writing team hasn't been so consistently bad since 1995. Characters are stale. Stories mean nothing. WWE produces more weekly television than almost anyone in the world, and yet they can't follow the basics of storytelling. Night of Champions was yet another example of what's wrong with the product. The pieces are there; when will they finally get put together properly?

Questions? Comments? Reactions? Find me on Twitter @BTuckerTorch, where I talk about wrestling and... stuff!

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