#5 It holds the title hostage
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Those part-timers aren’t going to be there to help keep the lights on during the times where they’re on a leave of absence (hence why they are “part-timers”) and if you put a championship on any of them, that title just fades away.
While WWE usually adheres to the rematch clause story element more often than not, another one is the 30-day mandatory title defence stipulation. Every champion theoretically needs to defend his or her belt every month or it will be taken away from them for dodging competition.
If injured stars are forced to give up their titles well before those 30 days are up, why do part-timers get an exemption?
Once again, we know that there is no storyline reason for this, but a writer’s omission we’re supposed to ignore so they don’t have to pay a guy to make more appearances, but that doesn’t excuse it—particularly as this is entirely avoidable when you’re calling the shots of who wins and who loses!
Goldberg will be within the 30 days when he fights at Wrestlemania but assuming he drops the belt to Brock Lesnar, what happens after that?
History has shown that we won’t see the Universal Championship again until Summerslam, which is August 20th. Do you really want to see Raw without a world champion for the entirety of April, May, June, July and most of August?
It wasn’t necessary to put Goldberg in a match with Owens, as that was only done to give Goldberg the title. I hope the image of seeing him with the strap for the next 4 weeks is worth it, as the transition from Goldberg to Lesnar is going to kill Raw’s roster for the next five months to follow.
And if you’re thinking you’d rather not see the ugly red belt during that time anyway, then WWE has already failed in establishing any importance to the championship, which means giving it to Goldberg meant nothing, to begin with.
On paper, it will look good in the future to say that Goldberg and Lesnar are former universal champions, but if the product during that time is a sheer absence of that same title, nobody will associate that with anything good and it will be as pointless as saying William Regal is a 5x hardcore champion. So what? That’s the same belt Pete Gas and one of The Godfather’s hos won, and Raven held it 27 times.
By the end of 2017, the infancy of the Universal Championship will have a legacy of the first champion relinquishing it 24 hours later, Kevin Owens being squashed by Goldberg who lost it to Lesnar who disappeared for half the year. God forbid he drops it to Roman Reigns, as by that point, it will be cursed in the eyes of the fans.
Now that Goldberg has the championship, it’s too late to undo some of this, but there’s still time for WWE to course correct to avoid a few of these problems. All we have to do now is hope that’s what’s in store because if the company falls victim to these issues, it’s going to be a rough year.
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