IMG Credit: WWE

I’m not going to waste your time on this one as there are only three viable options. 2018 was a good year for pay per view as there weren’t a lot of horrible shows. It’s interesting that wrestling companies can get the big stuff so well but have so many problems with the weekly shows. We’ve covered that enough though and now it’s time to get to the big ones.

Backlash

This would be the BEAT THE TRAFFIC show that went nearly an hour longer than it needed to and had one bad match after another with the only two good ones being matches that had been done better before. This was the wrong show in front of the wrong crowd at the wrong time. That Roman Reigns vs. Samoa Joe main event was the expired icing on the spoiled cake and made this one even worse than I thought was possible.

Greatest Royal Rumble

Oh you knew we were getting to Saudi Arabia. Tell me: other than Strowman winning and Titus’ funny fall, what else happened on this show? Well we had Roman Reigns and Brock Lesnar ruining a cage match, and a far too long main event. This show set the WWE Saudi Arabia relationship off on a bad foot and it was only going to get worse.

That worse would be the worst of the year.

Crown Jewel

Like it was going to be anything else. I didn’t get to watch this show live as I had to take care of some stuff outside of town. My wife read me the results as we came home and we were having trouble keeping the car straight from laughing at how stupid the whole thing was. There was a tournament won by Shane McMahon (who wasn’t involved in the first place), Brock Lesnar becoming Universal Champion again, and a disaster of a main event that is going to be on the list of all time awful ones. This was a different kind of bad and nothing really came close all year.

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This is one of the more fun ones.

For some reason, this one always seems like it should have a lot of nominees. The thing is though, most WWE pay per views aren’t all that bad. Sure some of them might seem like they don’t need to exist (because they don’t), but at the same time most of them give you at least something worth checking out. That wasn’t the case with all of them though.

I’ll be leaving Survivor Series off as I thought it was actually a rather good show held down by some HORRIBLE booking and execution of the show’s namesake matches. Throw those out and make it a regular pay per view and it’s a near classic with Shield vs. New Day and Brock vs. Styles. I don’t get the hatred for that one outside of the terrible main event.

We’ll start things off with a show that didn’t seem to get the point that it was going for. Clash of Champions, in theory at least, should be a show focused on champions. That made it a little weird when the show was almost entirely built around a non-title match between Randy Orton/Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Kevin Owens/Sami Zayn. The show was main evented by a title match but that was the token main event at best. This show didn’t need to exist and with a total of six matches including one that was less than two minutes long, it was a mess.

If that show didn’t need to exist, then Payback didn’t need to even less. The problem here was the Superstar Shakeup, which was scheduled to start immediately after the pay per view. Therefore, none of the matches mattered and what we got (the House of Horrors) was a huge mess. This was a major scheduling conflict but it’s not like the was going to be any good no matter what they did.

I’d feel weird if I didn’t include a TNA show in here so we’ll go with Bound For Glory. The show was basically headlined by the return of Alberto El Patron and that meant we were stuck hearing the word perro a lot. The wrestling wasn’t great with the MMA vs. wrestlers match being a disaster and almost nothing positive standing out. As usual, this didn’t need to be a pay per view but I do understand that they need something to build towards. This just wasn’t the best choice.

Then you have the easy winner with Battleground and it’s not one but TWO potential worst matches of the year. This show was HORRIBLE aside from AJ vs. Owens and New Day vs. the Usos but the two really bad matches more than drag those down. This was an easy pick for me and a hands down winner, mainly due to that main event. Just….egads.