Smark Out Moment

The second annual Smark Out Moment 2019 CHAMPSGIVING tournament has come to a close and you've decided who you think is the best hardcore champion in WWE history.

This tournament was comprised of everyone who ever held the WWE Hardcore Championship throughout the course of the title's lineage. The few with the least title reigns and shortest times were eliminated in a qualifying round that set up the 32 competing in the bracket and your votes determined who won each match.


After those six rounds, the final came down to Rob Van Dam against The Undertaker and now, the results are in. With a score of 27 (65.9%) to 14 (34.1%), ROB VAN DAM has been declared your winner.



CLOSEST CALL

I had to extend the semifinals as Rob Van Dam vs. Jeff Hardy was a deadlocked tie for days. Each time someone got a vote, the opposite got another. Oddly, that wasn't the absolute closest, though, as eventually, RVD pulled ahead with 3 more votes (24-1) to get 53.3% of the score.

Funny enough, RVD was just barely the winner of the two matches that were closer calls than that.

In round 3, he beat Mankind 20-18 with just 52.6% of the vote.

Prior to that, in round 2, he nearly lost to Raven with a score of 18-17, which was the official closest match with RVD only winning with 51.4% of the vote.

And yet, despite nearly losing to Raven, Mankind and Jeff Hardy, he still managed to win the whole tournament. What a trooper.

BIGGEST LANDSLIDE VICTORY

Mankind beat Goldust in round 2 with 97.1% of the vote in a 34-1 score. Nothing else came close to that wide of a margin.

BIGGEST SHOCKERS

To me at least:

Round 1 = I would have thought Hardcore Holly might have beaten Jeff Hardy.
Round 3 = Bubba Ray Dudley beating Crash Holly surprised me.

ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM WITH THE TOURNAMENT

Last year's Champsgiving was a situation where people voted based not on who they thought was the best world champion, but who they liked the best overall. It completely negated the point of making this about a title (ie, champsgiving) and it made the whole thing rather useless, as I might as well had just put up a "Who is your favorite wrestler out of this list?" poll.

This year, I wanted to try to avoid that by reminding people right out of the gate that the voting is supposed to be based on this particular belt's title reigns and not each person's overall careers. For instance, Crash Holly didn't accomplish much outside of this title, but that shouldn't make him a bad hardcore champion because he never won the intercontinental title.

Still...for some reason...people indicated that they just did not want to keep their votes to each wrestler's title with this title.

Thus, I'm at a crossroads. Clearly, if we do Champsgiving again with another title (women's champion, tag team champions, etc), it's not going to matter. D-Generation X only held the tag titles once with HBK and HHH, yet because they're so popular, you guys are going to want to vote them as the best tag team champions of all time even if their title reign wasn't good, just because you liked them as a stable beyond that title reign.

To be honest, that pretty much kills the point of Champsgiving as a concept and I'm 50/50 on whether or not to bother with this tournament next year. If I do try it out, it will have to be one of the following concepts:

1. Ranking the best title belt designs where you just pick your favorites out of a lineup and that's it, with nothing really to analyze about the tournament other than "I like the way this one looks better."

2. Since you guys would rather prefer voting based on someone's overall career, maybe instead of focusing on a title, it can be a Triple Crown or Grand Slam Champion list (but once we do those for the men and women, there aren't any ideas for future tournaments).

3. A tournament about oddball titles. Which championship concept do you prefer better, the 24/7 title, the hardcore title, the TV title, the cruiserweight title, the midcard titles, the world titles, the tag titles, etc.



Big thanks to everyone who participated in this tournament. If you have any suggestions of what you'd like to see happen in future tournaments or ideas of how we can improve this, make sure to leave us a comment or shoot us an email to send that message our way!