Vince McMahon has made a habit out of making last-minute changes to WWE programming lately, furthering his involvement in WWE’s booking without physically being at the venue for each show. Sean Ross Sapp reported via Fightful Select before this week’s Monday Night Raw that McMahon made some “drastic changes” to this week’s show, specifically the opening segment. That was supposed to be Seth Rollins defending his World Heavyweight Championship in an open challenge, with BWE reporting it was supposed to be against a returning Tommaso Ciampa.
Rollins wound up getting attacked before the match by Finn Balor, with “The Prince” nailing him with three Coup De Gras finishers outside the ring. With the match getting scrapped, Ciampa would instead return by answering The Miz’s open challenge and beating him with a Fairytale Ending. Tonight’s title match between Rollins and Bron Breakker on NXT is still set to happen as advertised.
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Seth Rollins on WWE’s Plans for His World Heavyweight Championship
Rollins has already defended his championship seven times on TV, dark matches and at live events since winning the title at Night of Champions a little over three weeks ago — a far cry from Roman Reigns’ four title defenses since the start of the year. He recently explained WWE’s plans for the new title on My Love Letter to Wrestling.
“I think just kind of calling it the work-rate title is a little bit underselling it. At the end of the day, the title exists because our roster is so chock full of talent. There’s just too much to have one champion that’s not around very much, and so I think the fact that we had so many worthy contenders, people that could hold this championship, I think that is the reason the title exists,” Rollins said.
“If we had a weak roster and things weren’t good and stuff wasn’t hot, it might be fine just to have one champion who wasn’t around, didn’t want to make live events, but that’s just not the case,” he continued. “We’re selling out left and right, we’re hot, from here to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Paris, France, Mexico City, it doesn’t matter. We’re just selling out left and right, and we need to have a World Heavyweight Champion on the men’s side to represent that level of competition. So I think we’re going to put in the work to build this title to be as big as any championship in wrestling. We’re not naive and think that we don’t need to put that work. We know that it needs to happen. But we’ve got the roster, and the guys and the crew who are willing to put in the time to make it feel as big as it is.”
Update: Dave Meltzer explained why McMahon scrapped Rollins’ title match on Wrestling Observer Radio (h/t WrestleTalk) — “The open challenge was supposed to happen till the last minute. Vince changed… the first 30 minutes of the show, I heard, was totally changed. Vince really wanted this… the whole Seth Rollins angle with Finn Balor, I think he just wanted something big, something bigger for Seth Rollins and Finn Balor, just to heat up Finn Balor. To be fair, I know people who are there who told me, ‘Look, as far as the 30 minutes that Vince put in, it was better than the 30 minutes that was taken out’.”
