Smark Out Moment

There are 17 championships in WWE today when you count Raw, SmackDown, 205 Live, NXT and NXT UK. Out of those, all but 4 of them have side plates in some fashion or another.

Those 4 are the Intercontinental Championship, the United States Championship, the Raw Tag Team Championship and the SmackDown Team Championship.

So what gives?

Obviously, the tag titles need a full redesign, as it seems nobody in the world except probably Vince McMahon likes the stupid spartan heads. Thankfully, the women's tag titles are a much better design. Here's hoping WWE just adapts that concept and applies it to the Raw and SmackDown men's titles. It works so well having one side plate be each member of the team if it's a duo, or if it's a stable, just two side plates of the logo (The New Day would be just those symbols, The Undisputed ERA would just be that one, etc)

The Intercontinental Championship still has four grapplers as side plates, which is horribly outdated and needs to be replaced. Ideally, in my mind, the four side plates would be condensed to just two. There's no need for four. But if you did have four, I'd like to see two custom plates for the wrestler, naturally, and the other two are things I'm not sure about. Maybe some kind of legacy of the title? Again, I'd rather just keep it to two so there's no need to figure out this problem.

With the United States Championship, I still maintain my argument that it should change to the International Championship and the belt should change designations based on the person who wears the title. There would be four side plates: two with the logo of the wrestler's iconography and two for their nationality. For example, R-Truth would have his logos and then an American flag x2, or maybe an American flag and then something like the Statue of Liberty that they have as a side plate right now for the United States title. Then, if a guy like Drew McIntyre were to win it, those two location-based plates would be one of the flag for Scotland and one of something else, or just two flags.

However, if WWE wanted to specifically keep it the United States Championship, then maybe everyone just gets two side plates and there isn't anything else on the side. That's much easier in the long run, isn't it?

The point is, it's weird and strange that they haven't bothered to get new titles made for these four belts when I can't imagine it would take much to really change up the designs from what they already have. Just get rid of the name plate for the US title and adjust the center plate a little bit and change the four side plates to two, change the side plates for the Intercontinental Championship but don't touch the center plate, and make a red and a blue strapped (even though I don't like that, WWE clearly does) bigger versions of the Women's Tag Team Championship and replace "Women's" with "Raw" and "SmackDown" and you're good.

Side plates. Do them.