One of the big complaints about Elimination Chamber Sunday from those who watched was that it was too predictable. Everything that happened could be seen coming from a mile away. Why should they pay $60 to WWE for something that wouldn’t keep them guessing at every turn? Maybe they do have a point. Why pay to tune into an event where the way the stories play out are apparent before they happen?

That complaint would be valid to me if the only reason anyone tuned into a pay-per-view was to be swerved. Personally, I tune in because there’s a match I want to see, if not more than one match. If I go into the event knowing every single result before it happened, but every match was good to great? Yeah, I would totally feel like my money was spent wisely. I didn’t view Elimination Chamber, but I heard that there was a consensus that both Chamber matches were really good and that the Divas Championship match was the best female wrestling match in WWE in a couple of years, which in and of itself is a small miracle. There were problems with it, yes, but I feel like predictability is lowest on the totem pole after match order making no sense and the utter hokeyness of the Ambulance Match as a closer.

Obviously, there needs to be some imagination and variance in how things play out. If everything was predictable all the time, then of course things would get stale quick. Then again, if the main thrust in the argument is that people are sick of seeing John Cena win all the time, and they paid $60 for/risked arrest for pirating an event where John Cena predictably won, whose fault would it be that they were out that money? That being said, context is key for knowing when to expect when the status quo is going to reign and when there should be a shake up.

Elimination Chamber is the kind of event where no one should have been going in expecting to be swerved. It’s the last pay-per-view on the schedule before WrestleMania. It’s the spot where the final plans for the main event level matches begin to become clear. The swerves and the unpredictable stuff usually is out of the way by the Royal Rumble. EC is the event where fans get two Chamber matches, replete with high spots, scads of violence and hijinks with the most durable substance known to man, LEXAN.

Besides, when given the choice between having an event with a ton of swerves and terrible, short matches or one with predictable endings with great wrestling, most fans would choose the latter every time. It’s a big reason why Vince Russo’s name is spoken among wrestling fans with the hushed tones normally reserved for Lord Voldemort around the halls of Hogwarts. His swerve-heavy television wasn’t nearly resonate as “quality” programming.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s no place at all for unpredictability. However, needing it as a prerequisite for good wrestling seems to be a method of watching for those with little to no attention span whatsoever. For me? I’ll take a show where everything is done well, regardless of whether I saw it coming or not, over something where everything that’s done comes out of left field.

TH writes The Wrestling Blog and broadcasts The Wrestling Podcast. You can find him on Twitter, or at various other spots around the Internet. He also loves Chikara, and quite frankly, thinks you should too.

Edited by K Sawyer Paul