PARKS’S TAKE: This really cool concept has devolved into overuse, and it’s more a sign of creative laziness than serving fans

When John Cena began his United States Title Open Challenge back in 2015, I thought it was a novel idea and a good one to help raise the prestige of the secondary championship by defending it against all comers every week.

In 2026, the Open Challenge concept has been completely watered down. Recent U.S. Champions brought back the challenge on Smackdown. Oba Femi is currently doing it on Raw. Tiffany Stratton sounds like she’s going to be implementing it with the Women’s U.S. Title on Smackdown. Heck, even AEW is getting into the act with Darby Allin and the AEW Championship, and TNA with Mustafa Ali’s International Open Challenge for the company’s International Title.

The message this sends to the viewer is that creative isn’t interested in building contenders to these titles, so they’d rather just have random opponents each and every week. It takes the job of slotting wrestlers and coming up with some kind of kayfabe internal rankings system out of their hands. Fans want to believe wrestlers “earn” title shots, but the open challenge allows anyone to contend under the guise of these storylines.

Speaking of storylines, doing these challenges prevents creative from having to come up with intricate or well-thought-out storylines for the champions (or in Femi’s case, the wrestler holding the challenges). The writers can just say “let’s do an open challenge!” and voila, anything goes.

They don’t have to put the time and energy into thinking about week-to-week character advancement and story arcs. They can just throw somebody out there as an opponent, whether they’re “deserving” in canon or not.

The tell here is what wrestlers are holding these open challenges. I’m a little softer on AEW for doing this because it’s not something they’ve done often like WWE has, and Darby is exactly the kind of wrestler who would do this: Reckless and without care about what these weekly, intense title matches will do to his body over time.

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He feels the need to constantly prove he’s worth, deserving of being the top champion. Tiffany Stratton… not so much. Even as a babyface, this seems outside of what her character would do. In that way, it just feels like a lazy solution for the writers.

It’s sad to see the Open Challenge concept devolve into overuse. When utilized correctly, as it was by John Cena and others, it can really help put a specific title on the map. Now, it feels more like a crutch for over-extended creative teams.