How surprised are you that the WWE were able to pull this Cena/Rock match off? They actually were able to build a match one year out into this huge mega super event. Typical WWE don't even think one week in advance, let alone plan something a year away and actually pull it off pretty damn successfully. I know it's Cena/Rock and there is no way they could have screwed it up, but they deserve some credit, don't they?
Yeah, some, but they didn’t really BUILD anything over that year. They happened to announce it a year ago, then forgot about it completely for months, then had them teaming up at Survivor Series for no reason, and then finally starting building the actual match 6 weeks out. Justin Shapiro had a great analogy, where the writers are high school students assigned a paper 6 weeks away and so they’re like “Well we’ve got 6 weeks to study and prep for this” and basically do nothing for the first 3 weeks before suddenly realizing that it’s due in 3 weeks and nothing has been done. Clearly the creative team just can’t deal with stuff outside of their usual 4 week cycle (waste the first week, build for 3 weeks) and six weeks of build time was just WAY too much to deal with.