Being a professional wrestling fan is a bit like having an alcoholic parent. Things may be good, or even great for months, and then in just one night there’s a complete shift and everything is awful.

Night of Champions (NOC) was one of those nights. WWE has been on a roll since an uneven Wrestlemania back in early April. The feuds have been compelling, deserving stars have seen the spotlight, and the product as a whole felt fresh and exciting in ways it hasn’t been for awhile.

This all culminated in August in what was probably my favorite pay-per-view of all time in, Summerslam. The matches were amazing, and the feuds leading up to the matches were genuinely exciting.

Then things got weird. While the main event buildup for NOC had been firing on all cylinders, there were some bumps in the road. Daniel Bryan is hotter than the stove I used to touch to get my parents to notice me. Likewise, being held down by HHH, the COO of the company has made the fans love him even more.

But then there’s the Big Show. 7 feet tall, 425 pounds, 5 time world champion, and strip mall investor? As the only wrestler in the company who has a storyline “iron clad contract” (he can’t get fired for any reason) it would make storyline sense for him to be the only one to break the rule that no one on the roster could stop HHH and his cronies from beating the shit out of Bryan.

Instead, how do the writers get around it? Big Show, a wrestler that has been around since the mid 1990’s and has been in movies, is broke. This happened because to quote Stephanie McMahon “the strip mall closed down.” As a result he’s broke and can now somehow get fired (sometimes the writers forget things). So instead of using this iron clad contract and helping the star of the WWE get even, he’s forced to punch Bryan in the face at the end of every episode. Again this is because A STRIP MALL HE INVESTED IN WENT UNDER.

There have been other weird story decisions, but covering them here would only make me want to drink alone more than I currently do. So I guess I’ll just get right to NOC, which managed to continue the disappointment.

To spoil everything, the only belt that changed hands was the one that probably shouldn’t have, and will probably be reversed by this time tomorrow.

Two matches weren’t even booked before the show started, and one gets to a very weird side of the WWE. My least favorite wrestler, The Miz had an unannounced impromptu match with Fandango, the sometimes-popular Dancing With the Stars pastiche.

Fandango’s character represents what I assume to be the owner of the WWE, Vince McMahon’s obsession with dancing. For whatever reason, The WWE has for years had dance offs, dancing themed characters and other things that illustrate a homoerotic obsession with men and dance. For whatever reason this match wasn’t booked in advance, both men just walked out to start a match. This is simply lazy booking and one let alone two unannounced matches lower the “pay per view feel” of these shows. When the match began my brother texted me and said that this whole show felt like a normal episode of Raw.

While some of the matches were fine, the crowd didn’t seem to get behind anything that was going on (thanks Detroit). A bad crowd can make a good show bad and a bad show worse. This makes wrestling weird in that sense, I think in a vacuum you can enjoy football or basketball or other sports no matter what the crowd is doing, this isn’t the same with wrestling. A match needs a good crowd to be truly good, and it can make a night more memorable. Some of the biggest moments of the year (See, Dolph Ziggler’s Money in the Bank cash in, CM Punks return to the WWE in Chicago) were that much better because the entire crowd lost its mind.

The only time the crowd seemed excited was when Bryan won the WWE title again. Unfortunately even that seemed restrained since it was obvious that the crowd was waiting for that decision to be reversed. It never happened, but the crowd still seemed to know this celebration wouldn’t be for anything that was going to last.

The only other gripe I’m going to mention is the finish of the World Heavyweight Title match between RVD and Alberto Del Rio. While ADR falls pretty flat with the crowd, he’s fantastic in the ring. He works about as stiff as it gets, and his kicks to the head legitimately make me think he’s dishing out concussions. RVD won by disqualification, and hit ADR with a Van Terminator post-match, which involves him jumping from one end of the ring to another and kicking someone in the face with a chair.

It was devastating, and in normal WWE logic, it would make sense that the Money in the Bank briefcase winner would cash in at that moment. Instead, Sandow was nowhere to be seen, and the announcers didn’t even mention this as a good opportunity. The so-called intellectual savior of the WWE sure looked like anything but that. I’d like to say this omission will be addressed tonight, but I can’t give the writer’s credit to do stuff like that. To make matters worse, he tweeted “I wonder how much longer I will be the uncrowned champion? Months? Weeks? Hours? Min? #WWENOC” just minutes before this happened. In the world of wrestling, this meant he was in the building, and makes this an even stranger storyline choice.

So all and all NOC was definitely not worth 45 bucks, as that would have felt like paying for an episode of Raw. I hope things get on track for the next PPV, Battleground. However that’s only in three short weeks, which makes it unlikely thing will fall together that quickly.

Please…save me from my obsession with wrestling