It hasn’t been a good year to be a citizen of the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The wizard of Waverly passes himself, Blake Bortles, defeated a heavily favored Pittsburgh Steelers in the AFC playoffs. The NHL juggernaut Pittsburgh Penguins, who were usually penned in to beat the Washington Capitals, finally lost to the Caps who went on to secure a Stanley Cup. The Pittsburgh Pirates are middling at .500 this season and they don’t have Andrew McCutchen anymore so who cares?

Then WWE Extreme Rules rolled into Pittsburgh. A pay-per-view event that despite the promise of people getting hit by chairs, thrown through tables, and attacked with a myriad of foreign objects, Extreme Rules is usually a lackluster uneventful show. WWE was embarking on yet another oversaturated 4-hour marathon that was plodding along, with only a potentially great Iron Man match to save some face.

The WWE fans in Pittsburgh had other plans and were collectively quoted as saying, “Hold my fruit juice.” Even drunk people aren’t this laughably childish.

Seth Rollins vs. Dolph Ziggler. Intercontinental Championship Iron Man match. Main event match. People were using the word classic before this match began. And now, the match will be known as a classic blunder. A colossal mistake that no one saw coming, but I’ll tell you why no one should be surprised.

from WWE.com

Seth Rollins is one of the best wrestlers on the WWE roster, sharing the esteemed ground with AJ Styles and a resurging Daniel Bryan. Ziggler is the B-rate Shawn Michaels. Ziggler’s career has been a tumultuous one bouncing around from brief pushes to meaningless feuds and repetitive character arcs. Ziggler wants to be Shawn Michaels but has ended up with Big Show booking.

But there’s one saving grace to Dolph Ziggler. When the moment demands excellence, Ziggler is a force in the ring. With Rollins across from him, Ziggler would be asked to step up, and we expected Ziggler to oblige.

Iron Man matches are special occasions in the WWE. They’ve become even more hallowed than the Hell in a Cell match. One of the reasons is the lack of frequency. Iron Man matches are rarely booked. They require a unique amount of endurance, awareness, and expert storytelling to be effective. There has been only 16 Iron Man matches in the WWE. You may get one a year. You may get none. There were no Iron Man matches from 2010 to 2014. Last year’s Iron Man match between Sheamus and Cesaro and the Hardy Boyz was brilliant. Iron Man matches are a spectacle, and the bar has been set impossibly high.

We’ve already seen at Wrestlemania how a zombie crowd can sway the opinion of match quality. AJ Styles and Nakamura put on a great performance to a tired murmuring audience leaving fans at home disappointed over the match.

Fans don’t determine the wrestling quality of a match, but they do impact the viewing experience. You can have a simple wrestling match, but if the fans are hanging on the balance of every move, the match is exciting to watch. Case in point: Hollywood Hulk Hogan vs. The Rock at Wrestlemania 18.

If you put the Hogan-Rock bout on mute, you wouldn’t walk away saying this is a 5-star match. The selling is excellent and you could pick up the simple storytelling, but there’d be something missing. Everything The Rock and Hogan do in this match is to feed the crowd more energy. One thing is for certain, the crowd is completely invested in seeing the legendary Hulk Hogan succeed on the Wrestlemania stage one more time.

16 years later and here we are. A tipping point. Crowds have gone from full-on interacting with the wrestlers in the ring, to being their own entertainment.

Iron Man matches have a time limit. A timer is displayed on the jumbotron. Early into Rollins and Ziggler’s match, the crowd began a countdown when 10 seconds were left in a minute. Rollins’ post-match tweet:

WWE production staff tried to react and take the clock off the jumbotron to encourage the fans to stop counting down. The fans in attendance were not only counting in the final 10 seconds of a minute but in the middle of a minute as well. Ziggler could be heard saying on the hot mic, “It was worse when the clock was on.”

The countdown chant was pointless in the first place, but the fact it kept going and going and going and going was flat out disrespectful. I found myself having a difficult time paying attention to the match because I was dreading anytime the clock got close to a 10, the chant would begin.

The fans at the PPG Paints Arena made themselves and the WWE look like idiots. This is the equivalent of spending your hard-earned money by going to a Bruno Mars concert, and the entire crowd sings Taylor Swift songs in the middle of Mars performing one of his own songs. Why the Pittsburgh fans would decide to be more invested in a timer than one of the best wrestlers in professional wrestling is absurd and beyond my capabilities of human understanding. Who can take the WWE seriously when their fans act like children but are mostly grown adults?

When sports fans going to a sporting event, their cheers and boos and chants are in relation to the game they’re watching. Soccer fans have a set of chants derived from the camaraderie of supporting their club. Some wrestlers attempt to establish chants as rallying cries for their brand. For Rollins, the fans would chant, “Burn it down.”

What the fans did in Pittsburgh during Extreme Rules 2018 was the PG equivalent of FU to Rollins and Ziggler by being more entertained by the clock than their match. The fans were not self-aware enough to realize they were upstaging the show and ruining the viewing experience. Wrestling fans spend $10 a month to have the WWE Network to watch these events. Not only is the audience wasting their own money, they’re wasting mine and the millions of others watching at home.

The sad truth is, this moment where the crowd decided they were more important than a good wrestling match was only a matter of when and not if. There’s a cultural rift between hardcore WWE fans and reality.

Live show fans have been reprimanded for playing with beach balls during matches. They’ve chanted self-congratulatory remarks like, “We are awesome.” A hilarious dumb trend lately has been fans cheering for the guitar strumming Elias and then booing him when he talks trash about their city.

What is the cause of this cultural rift where fans believe they’re more important than the show they pay to watch? WWE fans are increasingly less entertained by the simulated combat aspect that wrestling was built on. A choreographed fight between larger than life personalities who talk a lot of shit.

A seminal moment in this rift was when The New Day was universally accepted by WWE fans as faces and not heels. Their gimmick is highlighted by heavily supporting My Little Pony, with Xavier Woods being a self-proclaimed brony. Bronies are grown men that watch or have an interest in the My Little Pony show. In the court of public opinion, being a brony doesn’t give you much credibility to be taken seriously.

from YouTube

The New Day has committed so many uncomfortable onscreen atrocities during their tenure, I don’t watch any segment or match they have any involvement in. One of their most infamous innuendos is through their self-branded cereal, “Booty-O’s. The innuendo there is self-explanatory. The group has twerked during their segments, and Big E Langston has a move where he puts another man in an abdominal stretch and slaps their ass. I can’t be the only one who cringes as Big E’s face lights up like he’s turned on.

The specific fan The New Day attracts is the type of fan who wants to be the meme. The sort of fan who thinks playing a countdown game is more fun than enjoying a great wrestling match. If you think I’m being harsh on The New Day, read the previous two paragraphs again. Then use common sense.

What about Santino Marella? He was an unorthodox goofy character. First of all, he wasn’t wearing a unicorn horn that looks like a dick on his forehead. Secondly, there’s a place for comedy on WWE television. I didn’t find Marella funny but he’s not twerking over other wrestler’s faces during a match. Also, Marella wasn’t a massively popular wrestler. He wasn’t a highly touted or marketed character.

The role of goofy dancing weirdo roles in WWE are almost always jobbers. Fandango. Adam Rose. No Way Jose. Career jobbers. But The New Day tapped into the core of the dwindling WWE fanbase. You can’t criticize The New Day to a WWE fan without being lambasted and ridiculed. I personally don’t care because I’d rather not be associated. When I watch WWE, it’s for the talented performers like AJ Styles, Kevin Owens, Seth Rollins, and Daniel Bryan. When I check in on Impact I want to see what Eli Drake is up to, to see what’s going on with Moose, or Austin Aries.

Good wrestlers and good wrestling exists but to say the fan quality is shifting downward shouldn’t be controversial. For every intelligent quick-witted wrestling fan, there’s now a dense imbecile to match him/her. The same dummies that’ll tell you Roman Reigns or John Cena are great wrestlers and their promos are the best in the company.

It pains me to follow indie women wrestlers and see them post DM’s where their so-called fans are sending them perverted messages or questions. These same people are watching the WWE week to week and going to these shows. As a casual wrestling fan, I don’t want to be associated with these wackos. It’s death by association.

Two quick qualifiers for the internet complainers:

Are all WWE fans like the ones we saw in Pittsburgh’s Extreme Rules PPV? No. Obviously not. But the incessant focus on chants is nothing new.

Are The New Day the only reason the fan quality has dipped? No. The quality of WWE television as a whole has continued to drop weekly viewer count. The bad writing and booking is a whole other monster. The New Day’s antics have granted a level of acceptance within the fan base that won’t expand the fan reach, but rather restrict it into a dark corner of the internet occupied by basement dwellers and trolls. With that being the core fans the WWE is playing to, it pushes away fight fans and sports fans. Hence why The New Day are a pivotal genesis of the WWE’s most loyal and faithful devolving into clock counting dolts.

It’s easy as a WWE fan to refute my claims because you have a band of brothers ready to support your call to arms. Criticize the WWE fans? Criticize The New Day? How dare I commit such a crime?

This is the proverbial snowball rolling down a mountain. You give the WWE enough leeway with unicorns, wrestlers taking pancakes out of their jock, and references to eating ass, you’ve earned yourself a fan base who gets more excited about counting time than a high-quality Iron Man match.

The brutally honest truth is that the hardcore WWE fans have worked their way into becoming a show of their own that no one asked for. When most casual WWE viewers tune into a show or pay-per-view, they want to see good wrestling matches and the fans in attendance interact with the match. Great wrestling fans are an extension of the fans watching at home.

How does the WWE prevent the Iron Man match from being desecrated in the future? Create a better quality show with characters that talk a lot of shit. Personalities that relate and relay to more casual wrestling fans. The WWE needs to produce segments that casual fans can share with their non-wrestling fans and say, “This is cool, check this out.” That’d be a good start.

The world moves too fast to be upset about this moment for long, but I won’t be letting this go for some time. The fans finally got what they wanted. And it was at the expense of everyone watching at home, and to all the performers in the ring.