Ranking every NXT Championship match on an NXT TakeOver (and Arrival)

26. Johnny Gargano vs. Tommaso Ciampa(c)- Last Man Standing Match-NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn IV

I was not looking forward to reliving this match.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this match, don’t get me wrong. This match is very entertaining, with brutal spots fitting the nature of both the match stipulation and their rivalry, ambitious storytelling that sought to bring a somewhat more complex story than is usually told through a wrestling ring, and despite the length of this match, working an urgent pace throughout.

But this match was also beset by several problems. For one, the most predictable flaw of this match is that this was the third match in a rivalry that had long since run its course. The buildup to the first Ciampa-Gargano match was about a year-long, and while excellent, there never should’ve been a second, much less the third match for quite some time between these two. Within the match itself, they went way overboard with the amount of punishment both men were able to absorb and still escape. I’m not a “nobody should kick out of finishers” purist by any means, but the near-victories turned from epic, thrilling ways to stay alive to ridiculous, Gargano getting up after eating a Fairytale Ending to the stairs and rising before the ten count after being buried under debris being the most egregious. The match was also far too long, a reflection of the WWE trend to make their shows, and NXT main event matches, way too long for no reason other than to fit as much stuff in as possible. And the storytelling, while I can appreciate the ambition, was not executed particularly well, often coming across as silly and cringe more than genuinely emotional.

But with just the flaws listed above, this would still be a solid, fun main event between two of NXT’s best that wouldn’t be anywhere close to the bottom of the list, much less dead last. The reason for this match being dead last is the finish.

I’ve been subjected to a lot of awful finishes over the past few years of watching WWE. The wrong wrestler winning, nonsensical actions within the story by the wrestlers, or frustrating non-finishes that left me wanting more. But nothing was quite as awful as this. Gargano gained control of the match and began dominating Ciampa, forcing him to tap out on the stage (which didn’t win the match due to the stipulation) and handcuffing him to the stage. Ciampa, an ostensible badass, begins begging for mercy from Gargano, who keeps beating him anyways while delivering more cringe one-liners. Eventually, Gargano decides to get his revenge on Ciampa by going for one of Ciampa’s finishes, a  running knee strike with the kneepad pulled down. But in doing this, Gargano has a Wile E Coyote moment, as he accidentally runs off the stage after hitting the knee strike, hits his knee onto a crate off the stage, flips over and lands in a heap. As the ref delivers the 10-count, Ciampa falls off the stage and is propped up on his feet by the handcuffs while Gargano fails to get up in time. It is just as stupid as it sounds, and was that bad in real-time. They managed to make their top face look like a complete idiot, and their champion a complete chump, and did so in the slowest fashion possible.

This is well-deserved as the last place in the rankings of NXT Championship matches and is emblematic of the excessive match length and melodrama that has infested recent NXT main events, as well as the tendency of NXT to run its best rivalries into the ground.

25. Shinsuke Nakamura v. Bobby Roode(c)- NXT TakeOver: Orlando

I’ll start by providing some faint praise for this match. The early portions featuring Shinsuke and Roode taunting each other were entertaining. The match was well-paced in the latter half, helping the crowd stay in the match. And the final move itself, a Tornado Glorious DDT, was sufficiently epic enough to provide a firm end to the Nakamura/Roode rivalry.

But this match, despite not having the poorly-conceived finish of Roode/Nakamura I, also lacked most of the strengths of its predecessor, and highlighted the remaining flaws. Nakamura is just as much of an idiot as he is in the previous one, and perhaps more so since he keeps repeating the errors of using his severely-injured knee and failing to hook the leg after the Kinshasa, despite clearly having the energy to do so. The match also dragged significantly in the middle, and once again, the in-ring action itself wasn’t anything to write home about, and the selling of injured body parts (Roode’s arm, Nakamura’s leg) wasn’t particularly good either.

This was the end of Nakamura’s run in NXT, and completed the downward descent from starting off with one of NXT’s best matches ever, and concluded with one of the worst matches on this list. There was so much potential for a Nakamura run in NXT, and it was mostly left unfulfilled, a story that unfortunately repeated itself on the main roster.

24. Samoa Joe v. Shinsuke Nakamura(c)- NXT TakeOver: Toronto

Joe/Nakamura II attempted to fix one of the flaws of the previous match, the lack of any sort of story to hold the match together, but the story of this match, and the eventual neglect of it, hurt this match more than it helped. Matches based mainly on one competitor working the leg of the other have emerged as one of my least favorite types of matches in recent years, because doing pretty much anything in wrestling involves using the legs. This leads to either a match where the action is slow, plodding, and the face doesn’t do some of their most exciting moves, or a match where the face doesn’t sell properly. In this case, as the match progressed, it became the latter scenario, as Joe worked over Nakamura’s leg in the first half of the match, but Nakamura mostly ignored selling it for most of the latter half.

This match was also hurt, in my opinion, by who was booked to win. After each man had escaped or kicked out of each other’s biggest moves and finishers, Nakamura hit a second Kinsasha, but he used the injured leg that he had alternately sold and failed to sell, meaning he couldn’t get the pin. When he went for another, the ref ducked out of the way, turning his back to Joe low-blowing Nakamura. From there, Joe hit a Uranage on the steel steps, then the Muscle Buster in the ring to win. As far as finishers go, it was alright, but Joe winning sucked the momentum of Nakamura’s run and was overall a disappointing finish. Two other instances make this worse, as well. For one, while the Network dubbed the correct theme over, after Joe won, his old (awful) theme played for about 10-15 seconds, before the switch was made to the correct theme. For another, Nakamura immediately won the title back in Japan, in an attempt to revitalize Nakamura’s run and create a big moment. It failed to do either and was an even worse match than either of their TakeOver ones.

Some of the action was good, and there was real intensity in this match. But the poor selling and the terrible decision to put the title back on Joe unnecessarily hurt this match.

23. Shinsuke Nakamura v. Samoa Joe(c)- NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn II

Shinsuke Nakamura’s NXT run started off with a bang, with his match with Sami Zayn at TakeOver Dallas being a classic, and perhaps one of NXT’s best matches at this point. Certainly, it marked a passing of the torch from the outgoing Zayn to the new blood in Nakamura. After a solid match with Austin Aries at The End, Nakamura set his sights on the NXT Championship and earned a shot to face Samoa Joe.

While the crowd was red-hot for Nakamura throughout the match, this was sort of a disappointment. The match dragged a little bit, lacked any sort of overarching story beyond trading moves and eventually finishers (and not doing that particularly well), and while there was stiff striking in this match, it lacked the intensity of Joe’s previous title matches against Finn Balor, and other iconic NXT Championship matches. This match did its job of coronating Nakamura as champion, who won after two Kinshasas, and it certainly wasn’t the worst match on this list, but it was severely lacking and, if it wasn’t for the non-finish at TakeOver Unstoppable, would’ve been the worst title match up to this point for NXT.

Unfortunately for Nakamura and NXT, it would only get worse from here in terms of the quality of matches he’d put on in NXT, and later, WWE. Untapped potential overall, and underwhelming in big matches specifically, has sadly become the story of Shinsuke Nakamura’s run under the WWE umbrella, and this match marks the start of that trend.

22. Johnny Gargano v. Adam Cole(c)- Three Stages of Hell Match- NXT TakeOver: Toronto (2019)

This was one of the three matches I skipped watching, and unlike the other two, I feel that it wasn’t really worth watching. I’ll complain more in later entries about length, but this match was far too long for its own good and did so many big moves and ridiculous kick outs that I became numb to anything in the match, especially since there are two really long matches in the TakeOvers before this.

This match isn’t irredeemable in any sense. The wrestling is good, there’s ample brutality in the Street Fight and Steel Cage portions of this match, and the finish, while very similar to the finish for the HHH/Stone Cold Three Stages of Hell match, is still a satisfactory ending to this rivalry. But the excess that had already infested the recent TakeOver events ran fully amok in this match, and there wasn’t enough of a vested interest in the third match of this rivalry to make up for it.

In the future, NXT desperately needs to shake things up, and move away from these type of main events as the only thing they do. They have their place, but when done every time, combined by the obsession with doing trilogies, they lead to some deeply dissatisfying wrestling. Hopefully, the reign of Adam Cole sees the start of a new trend of mixing up the style of matches that main event TakeOver.