Randy Orton reportedly a reason for Drew McIntyre vs Dolph Ziggler being a non-title match

WWE officially kicked off its road to Summerslam on this week's episode of WWE RAW. The night kicked off with Randy Orton issuing a challenge to Drew McIntyre for his WWE Championship at SummerSlam. After McIntyre accepted The Viper's challenge and defeated Dolph Ziggler in a non-title match, Orton hit the WWE Champion with an RKO out of nowhere.

Dolph Ziggler's challenge to Drew McIntyre

Last week, after losing his chance to capture the WWE Title, Dolph Ziggler challenged Drew McIntyre to a rematch on WWE RAW. The Scottish Psychopath reluctantly accepted The Showoff's challenge when Dolph Ziggler gave McIntyre the liberty to choose the stipulation for their match.

When Drew McIntyre accepted the challenge, the WWE confirmed that the match would be for the WWE Title. But later on, WWE announced that the match between Drew McIntyre and Dolph Ziggler would be a non-title one.

Randy Orton is Drew McIntyre's next challenger

For the past few weeks now, Randy Orton was rumored to go after Drew McIntyre's WWE Title at SummerSlam. WWE's original plan was to have Randy Orton challenge McIntyre last week, but Vince McMahon had reportedly torn up the script.

According to Dave Meltzer, on the latest Wrestling Observer Radio, the confusion about the match being a non-title one was caused because of the nixed plans from last week.

“Last week one of the segments was going to be Randy Orton going for the title, but it was torn up. Obviously, it was torn up because they were going to do the title match at the next show and they talked about the title match on this show. Then within an hour they decided that they just wanted to make sure that the Orton/McIntyre match was promoted this week because they didn’t promote it last week originally, they delayed it a week, but they promoted it before that [Ziggler] match and [Orton] was directly challenging McIntyre, not the winner so it was a fact because they were doing it that way they had to do it a non-title match.” (h/t WrestleTalk)