WWE's Worst Match of the Week: Alberto Del Rio vs. Santino Marella (May 28th)

The amount of short and/or squash matches we see on WWE TV has grown to epic proportions as of late. It’s nothing but squash after squash after squash. In fact, I have temporarily renamed Friday Night SmackDown “SquashDown” in honor of all the 60-second matches.

Unfortunately for us WWE fans, all of those squashes are even spilling over to Monday Night Raw too.

Squashes in and of themselves aren’t that bad of an idea—it’s often how those squashes go down and who they involve that’s the real problem. Take this week’s Raw for example.

The WWE creative team decided, “Hey, let’s give Alberto Del Rio a squash match to make him look good before No Way Out.”

OK, not a terrible idea.

But did they feed Yoshi Tatsu to ADR? How about JTG? What about some other infrequently seen superstar?

No, apparently they thought it would be a brilliant idea to have Del Rio squash Santino Marella instead. Yes, the same Santino Marella who’s holding the United States Championship.

Now, I get that Santino is in a bit of a feud with Del Rio’s personal ring announcer Ricardo Rodriguez and that Santino is obviously a comedy character first and foremost. But on what planet is it ever a good idea to have your mid-card champion job in less than 60 seconds?

Not only did the “match”—if we can call it that—suck, but it made Santino look like a complete and utter joke.

This is precisely the kind of booking that is infuriating, the kind of booking that makes me wonder if creative really does crap like this just to mess with us.

Putting a mid-card titleholder in a short squash match doesn’t benefit anyone, besides maybe the person doing the squashing. It certainly doesn’t benefit Santino, and it sure as hell doesn’t benefit the fans, who would love to see more matches that last more than 60 seconds.

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.