Let me be straight with you. CM Punk and Cody Rhodes sharing a building on the SummerSlam go-home show should feel like the last night of school before summer. It should feel dangerous. Appointment television. The kind of segment you call your buddy about before it even ends.
A face-to-face.
A face-to-face.
I have watched this business for thirty years. I have seen a face-to-face segment used as the main event of a go-home show approximately nine hundred times, and I can count on one hand the number of times it didn’t feel like the booker running out the clock. You know what a face-to-face is? It’s a bookmark. It’s filler dressed in a suit. It’s two guys standing in a ring exchanging lines that the audience already knows are coming because they watched the exact same segment three pay-per-views ago.
Now here’s what makes it genuinely maddening. These are not interchangeable television actors who need protecting. Punk can talk a crowd into a fever with nothing but a microphone and bad intentions. Cody has grown into one of the most emotionally intelligent performers this company has had since prime Shawn Michaels. If you handed those two men a live wire and told them to improv for twelve minutes, they would close the building. You don’t manage Punk and Rhodes. You light a match and get out of the way.
Instead, Green Bay got a go-home show that sounds, from everything coming out of these three outlets tonight, like it was assembled by a committee that was also planning the catering order. A ladder match qualifier that exists because somebody needed to fill time. A title-vs-title match with Priest and R-Truth against the War Raiders which, to be fair, I will not bury — that match on paper is legitimate, those are real workers — but as the secondary attraction on the night you’re supposed to sell SummerSlam, it tells you everything about where the confidence level sits right now.
The main event of SummerSlam should already be sold. People should already have clicked the button, bought the ticket, told their wives they’re busy. The go-home show is supposed to be the last shove, not the first pitch. And if you need a face-to-face in 2026 to get people there, something broke down three weeks ago that you’re only now noticing.
Punk versus Rhodes has real money in it. Real, legitimate, top-of-the-card money. Don’t waste it on the same television you’ve been making for twenty years.
Do better. These two deserve it. The audience has earned it.
