Okay, so what we have here is a three-hour pay-per-view with a hundred dollar price tag and all we get are THREE matches… Two World Title matches which will see the champions retain their titles so that they can drop them at the next PPV (yeah, that’s right – both Edge and Miz walk out with their titles. That’s my pick.) and a Royal Rumble match that just got a boost from the traditional thrity-man format to a bloated forty-man format. Now, I said that I would reserve judgment for the match until I actually see it for myself (whether it’d be tonight through a stream or when the eventual DVD comes out), but hearing about this announcement beforehand made me wonder if they had enough talent to fill such a match.
Now here’s the deal… this is probably just a one-off thing to see if they could pull it off. If they manage to pull this off without a hitch, then it might work. However, there’s barely enough talent to pull it off, which means we’ll be getting surprise entrants for the sake of having surprise entrants. And if that’s the whole point of the bloating of the Rumble, then it’s a pretty pointless move since you could still have surprise entrants with the standard format. Hell, the whole concept of the Rumble that made it fun to watch is that you didn’t know who was going to show up. Now they just list off the list of participants in WWE.COM and randomize the order of entries. It’s just pointless.
So who’s gonna win the Rumble? I’d like to see someone new win it and get a title shot at Wrestlemania… maybe win the title. Someone like John Morrison, Alberto Del Rio, or CM Punk might be good candidates to win the match and seem to be popular choices among certain people. In fact, I would be more inclined to spend the hundred bucks on Wrestlemania if the main event featured a newcomer to the main event picture and quite possibly win the big one, earning him some fresh credibility and making a new star in the progress.
It’s the best idea to push if WWE insists on this whole “youth movement” that people claim they’re pushing for, not having old fucks like Triple H or John Cena win the Rumble again… although that’s going to happen anyway because WWE isn’t forward thinking.
So, to sum up my diatribe above:
My predictions:
Edge retains his World title.
Miz retains his WWE title.
John Cena wins the Rumble.
That is all.
dtm666 