The decision to book Sami Zayn for a nine-minute match against Baron Corbin didn't sit well with wrestling journalist extraordinaire Dave Meltzer, as he discussed on Wrestling Observer Radio. Now granted, the match wasn't bad per se, there were no egregious spots or strange booking decisions, but the decision to allow Corbin to work over Zayn for the majority of the match before the “Underdog from the Underground” got over just didn't sit right with Meltzer.

Why? Because, in his humble opinion, that's not how you build a top guy in professional wrestling.

“Their mentality obviously, watching the way this match was laid out, is that Sami is best served as the underdog and this underdog mentality, and therefore he has to be beat up for a lot of the time, and then comes back to win,” Meltzer said. “That is their Sami story, and is that’s the right story right now, when Sami’s up here and Baron Corbin’s down here? Meltzer asked. I don’t know, I was, you know, I mean they wanted to fill nine minutes, you know? And if you’re gonna do a long Corbin match, obviously you’ve got to sell a lot for the heel to get his heat and everything, which, he didn’t get any heat or got minimal heat I’d say, so it’s just interesting that a guy who is so much of a top guy and there’s nothing wrong with it, I just thought it was very interesting watching the mentality that, you know, again, that they believe that he has to sell and sell and sell and sell and sell and that’s what’s going to get him over and not be strong like another guy, like Cody Rhodes last week, right?”

“Didn’t he destroy Baron Corbin? So that tells you the difference between those two guys and it’s not like Sami’s so much smaller. Cody’s so much smaller too, and he showed a little bit but basically Cody destroyed the guy, I mean, it was just basically a showcase for Cody, he's a big star, Corbin’s just the guy who’s in there with him, you know, making him look like a star. And in this case, Corbin was in there because the idea is Sami must be in there getting beat up a lot to get over and I don’t know if that’s necessarily correct but I just thin that’s the difference between those two matches and the difference in the perception of those two guys in the sense that their belief is that he’s the underdog so therefor he cannot look strong and just go in there and run through him like he’s a made dude waiting to get to the title, facing the top guys and running through the big guys because he’s just a top guy. He is, in their minds, still what he was, he’s a plucky underdog babyface and that’s his role.”

Meltzer's take is pretty hard to argue with, as WWE would never put Rhodes in a match with a performer like Corbin and give the JBL-less performer that much offense. Oh contraire, Rhodes beat the you-know-what out of Corbin without even being in his gear on RAW, and that just helped to elevate his stock heading into WrestleMania 39. If WWE wants to make Zayn a mainstream, main event star, they probably need to rethink their booking strategy, but then again, it seems like that might not be the plan after all, with a tag team rum with Kevin Owens looking far more likely.

Dave Meltzer believes WWE can still build a Sami Zayn angle for WrestleMania.

Elsewhere on Wrestling Observer Radio, Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez discussed Zayn's opening angle with Kevin Owens on RAW and how it could lead to a very good match at WrestleMania 39.

“I really like this because I know obviously the key things are that Kevin Owens, you don’t have to give it away right away because the longer you do this the better story you tell,” Meltzer said. “You know it’s been very easy for them to go out there and have Kevin Owens accept and start building that match but we’ve got six weeks, so we don’t need, I think three weeks out we need the match pretty much done. But three weeks of storytelling that you can do and you know, situations on different shows where they end up for whatever reason, I mean, they should do as far as saving each other and things like that or one helps the other or whatever. You know, to where they end up together even though Kevin said that he doesn’t want to end up together so it’s kind of like this is the situation it should be but they did nothing on the rest of the show in that direction.”

Will Owens and Zayn actually wrestle The Usos at WrestleMania 39, or will WWE swerve things once more, with another match in mind for the duo down the line? Either way, it's going to be interesting to see how WWE decides to handle this one moving forward, as Zayn's February has been interesting, to say the least.