WWE's Lost Art: Why Don't Midcarders Cut Promos Anymore?

The WWE’s midcard is damn near nonexistent. 

It’s defined by two titles that don’t mean much anymore and hardly get defended, rehashed and recycled feuds and a general lack of direction. 

You can put the blame for all of the WWE’s midcard problems on whoever or whatever you want, and honestly, compiling a list of who or what to blame would take all day. 

But one of the biggest problems I see with the WWE’s struggling midcard isn’t something huge that cannot be fixed. 

It’s a rather simple solution: giving midcarders more promo time. 

Once upon a time, when midcard feuds truly mattered, the superstars involved in them got almost as much mic time as those involved in the main-event rivalries. 

It’s a simple concept, really—two guys didn't like each other, they got on the mic and explained why that was the case, and in turn, we actually had a reason to invest ourselves in that feud. 

But nowadays? Promos from midcarders—whether it be a backstage solo promo or one involving two guys in the ring—have all but vanished from the WWE. 

The company’s midcard rivalries happen, by and large, only because one guy is a baby face and the other is a heel. 

Take Raw’s current midcard for example—Kofi Kingston and R-Truth are feuding with Jack Swagger and Dolph Ziggler, while The Miz is feuding with Brodus Clay. 

Why? For no other reason than both of these feuds are supposedly a battle of good vs. evil. 

If you’d never watched the WWE before these feuds, you would have a difficult time determining why you should care if Clay beats The Miz or vice versa. 

Now, this can be traced back to a number of problems that creative has in booking the midcard, such as actually putting a storyline behind a feud. 

But at the very core of it all, the lack of any promo time whatsoever for the WWE’s midcarders is what’s had a detrimental domino effect on the entire company. 

If you’re not a bona fide main eventer or at least a borderline main eventer, you hardly ever get to speak. 

I mean, when’s the last time Ziggler or Swagger cut a promo? How about Kingston or Truth? What about Clay, The Miz or Zack Ryder? 

You’d be hard-pressed to recall a time when any of these guys got two or three minutes to show some personality in a backstage promo, or to try to get fans emotionally invested in their feuds with a five- or 10-minute in-ring segment. 

They just don’t happen anymore. They’re gone. Poof. Vanished. 

This is perhaps the best explanation of why the WWE’s midcard is struggling and so stagnant. There is virtually no difference—other than their in-ring skills—between any of the dozens of midcard talents. 

They just come to the ring, and if they’re smiling, they’re face. If they look angry, they’re heel. 

Even the guys who actually have gimmicks—Clay, Ryder, Truth, etc.—don’t truly get a chance to make the most of those gimmicks because everything that they do has to happen during their matches or their ring entrances. 

Backstage promos are rare. In-ring promos are even rarer. And as a result, actual feuds between midcarders have become rare, too. 

A feud is not putting Clay in a match with The Miz for three straight weeks. A feud is giving a baby face a legitimate reason to have beef with a heel, slowly building up the animosity between those two and then having it result in a match that people will care about. 

Yet, we can’t care about midcard PPV matches, because we can’t care about midcarders, because the WWE doesn’t care about them. 

I promise that it’s not that hard of a concept: Let the midcarders speak every once in a while, and give us a reason to hate or like them. 

Who knows? If you use this philosophy, WWE, you may actually create new stars.

Drake Oz is the WWE Lead Writer for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter and ask him any wrestling-related questions (to be answered in the B/R Mailbag) on Formspring.