Last week on Raw, it was announced that last night’s match between Dolph Ziggler and Drew McIntyre would be a rematch for the WWE Championship. This was reflected on the WWE.com preview but sometime during the week, the match was changed to a non-title match. The match was taped last Tuesday.
Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez discussed this on Wrestling Observer Radio and Meltzer explained why the decision was made to change it to a non-title match. Basically, Vince McMahon felt that Orton needed to announce that he was challenging for McIntyre’s title at SummerSlam but it would not make sense to directly challenge McIntyre and not Ziggler if the McIntyre-Ziggler rematch for the title had yet to happen.
Meltzer said, “Last week, one of the segments was gonna be this Randy Orton segment where he goes to challenge for the title and that was torn up. Obviously it was torn up because they were gonna do the title match on this show and they talked about the title match on this show.”
He continued, “And then, I guess within an hour, they decided that they just wanted to make sure the Randy Orton-Drew McIntyre match at SummerSlam was promoted this week because they didn’t promote it last week originally and they delayed it for a week but they promoted it before the Ziggler match and he was directly challenging McIntyre and he didn’t challenge the winner. Because they were doing it that way, they had to make it a non-title match and because McIntyre did the promo for Orton before his match so that’s the whole deal now where we have a non-title match.”
Meltzer noted that a lot of these creative changes are done because they want to try to boost the ratings. Meltzer added, “When you’re changing things every five minutes, that’s what happens. The only reason why McIntyre and Ziggler were even wrestling in a rematch after that decisive win was because they needed something.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Wrestling Observer Radio with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription. A WrestlingObserver.com subscription includes the Wrestling Observer Newsletter and daily audio shows in addition to thousands of hours of archived audio shows.
