[Mr. Nerfect]

Originally Posted by thedamndest I DEFINITELY remember the 30-day clause for HBK back in the day for the IC belt.

I never said there has NEVER been a numbered day rule for titles, the WWE has just seemingly done away with them. 30 days is the most recent one, but Michelle McCool violated that after winning the Divas Championship. The time restraints on defences have been ignored, and simply have ceased to exist in kayfabe.

They are a device of convenience. It is a scripted show, and the WWE will only bring days into it when it suits them. It didn't suit them when Dean Malenko was Light Heavyweight Champion back in 2001, and it doesn't suit them now.

Besides, CM Punk wasn't even stripped of the title. The RAW main event for the World Heavyweight Title went on without him. As for why people wanted to see the World Heavyweight Title put on Punk, and are now happy to see it taken off him, there are a number of reasons:

1) Those people are looking at the full picture. They see CM Punk being protected in the way he lost the title, they seem him looking great against Orton and they seem him winning his second World Heavyweight Title sometime next year, and it being done in an epic way that many bitched his first way wasn't (although with Money in the Bank, it wasn't meant to be an epic win).

2) The Chris Jericho vs. Shawn Michaels program, which has been the best part of the WWE for months, is now the central program of the flagship show. This is where attention deserves to be focused, and Jericho's done such a great job making over his heel character that he truly does deserve another run with the big gold belt.

3) The WWE are just unable to book CM Punk's reign correctly at this time. They have given him too many fluke wins, and they've done a good job at putting too many question marks next to his name. They could try an re-focus it against Orton, while Jericho flounders around doing nothing, and things go on as expected, but even if Punk ended up walking out of the Unforgiven as WWE Champion, the nature of the Scramble Match presented it as a chance win. The WWE decided to be bold, end the reign of Punk without a pinfall or submission against him name (hell, without a loss even to his name), and put him in a feud with Randy Orton, which will be far more compelling without the title. Now they can resume the reign at a later date, when Punk is more established, and comfortable in the main event scene. It's better to end the reign with a question mark beside it, and a note saying that Punk was cheated out of his belt, rather than ending it with a full-stop saying Punk was a Rey Mysterio-like champion.