WWE Is Hurting Intercontinental Championship Legacy with Short Reigns

The WWE Intercontinental Championship is being passed around like a collection plate at church.

The company can tag on the word "prestigious" to it and show all the clips of Hall of Famers with the title in hand that it wants. If it doesn't allow for longer reigns, the IC championship is going to continue to suffer in terms of prestige.

Dolph Ziggler defeated The Miz for the IC title on the Sept. 22 edition of Raw in a hard-fought match brimming with passion. 

Both men delivered. It was the best-worked match of the night and an improvement over their Night of Champions clash.

Why then was it so hard to care? Why did the accomplishment feel so insignificant?

Blame WWE moving the title too much, too quickly.  

Before a champion can put on any memorable title defenses, a challenger swipes the championship from his waist. Before a reign has a shot of becoming memorable, it ends.

It's like a comic book series ending after a single issue.

One night before Ziggler won the third IC title of his career on Monday's Raw, his second reign came to a close. The Miz dethroned him at Night of Champions. That follows The Showoff beating The Miz for the belt at SummerSlam only a month after the self-proclaimed A-lister won it at Battleground.

Credit: WWE.com

That marks four title changes since July and three straight pay-per-views where the champion lost.

There's no set amount of time for a perfect midcard championship reign, but it's certainly not what we're seeing right now. This constant trading of titles drains the emotional power of wrestlers winning and losing.

As Ryan Frye of Wrestle Enigma pointed out, the recent trend is reminiscent of TNA's X-Division, and not in a good way:

"

These constant IC title changes remind me of Sabin/Aries with the X-Division title last year... that's not a good thing. #RAW

— Ryan (@WiFrye) September 23, 2014"

Going at this rate, the title changes begin to feel cheap. There's no time to build up to a climax.

It's not a new problem in the least, either. Try thinking back to the last great IC champ. It takes quite the jump back in time.

When WWE compiled a list of the 25 greatest IC titleholders ever on its official website, the present wasn't well-represented. Of those ranked in the top 15, only Chris Jericho won the belt in the last 10 years. Only three of the top 15 won it this century.

That's not because there has been a lack of talent. It's due to playing hot potato with the strap.

Looking through the title's recent history on WWE.com, one finds far too many reigns that didn't even last a single month.

Champion	Date Won	Length of Reigns (in days)
Rob Van Dam	4/30/06	15
Johnny Nitro	4/6/06	7
JBL	3/9/09	27
Chris Jericho	6/7/08	21
Big Show	4/1/12	28
Cody Rhodes	4/29/12	21
The Miz	4/7/13	1
The Miz	7/20/14	28
The Miz	9/21/14	1

It wasn't always like that. Compare the first 10 years of the title's lineage to the last 10. Those periods couldn't be more different.

From 1979 to 1989 there were a total of 15 IC title changes. Ricky Steamboat's run in 1987 was the only one to last less than 100 days. On the other hand, between 2004 and 2014, the belt has changed hands 48 times. A total of 37 of those champions didn't hold on to the belt for 100 days.

It's hard to imagine that Tito Santana would have made it to the Hall of Fame had his two IC title reigns been like Miz's rather than both stretching past 200 days. 

How does one develop a connection with the audience without adequate time? How can a wrestler compile classic title defenses if he loses the belt on the first try?

Wrestling a great match like Ziggler and Miz did on Monday's Raw isn't enough to make a lasting impression. The memory of that bout will fade because it lacked the feeling that the title change mattered.

It was the exact opposite for Ultimate Warrior's win over The Honky Tonk Man in 1988.

In terms of in-ring action and athleticism, Miz and Ziggler blew that match away. After all, it was a 31-second bout with maybe four wrestling moves. It mattered that Warrior won, though, because Honky Tonk Man had held on to that crown for so long. The crooner had been champ for 454 days.

The audience salivated at the thought of someone finally knocking him off.

You can hear that in the emotion pouring out of the audience after what was actually a crappy wrestling match. The championship change made that match unforgettable despite its simplicity because a lengthy, seemingly never-ending reign came to a close.

Fans have missed that kind of moment of late.

Long reigns elevated Bret Hart's victory over Mr. Perfect at SummerSlam 1991, Triple H's win over The Rock at SummerSlam 1998 and Carlito knocking off Shelton Benjamin in 2005. It took more than having the title for an extended period to make those moments shine, but they wouldn't have been nearly as effective after 20 days as champ.

When Carlito defeated Benjamin in his first night on Raw, fans hadn't seen an IC title change in nearly 250 days. As Jim Ross described when calling the match, Benjamin was a fighting champion.

The stakes were clear here: Either the king held tight to his crown as he had for eight months, or the upstart would achieve a career highlight. Imagine how less significant those stakes would have been had there been four title changes in the two months leading up to this.

Things that happen too frequently become mundane. Making title changes a special occurrence makes them more powerful.

WWE did a better job of that last year when Curtis Axel and Big E got decent runs with the belt. That went a long way toward repairing its prestige. Fast-forward to 2014, and the company has taken a step backward, once again not letting champions be champions for a reasonable amount of time.

Ziggler and The Miz have traded the belt back and forth, reminding fans too much of 2000-2002, a span that saw 34 IC title changes.

With The Showoff now in possession of the gold once more, WWE would be better off flipping through that list of greatest IC champs and trying to make Ziggler match what men like Hart, Randy Savage and Pedro Morales did.

That's when the title felt like a trophy of extreme importance, not a prop that is obtained and lost with little effort.