Previously on Friday Night Smackdown…
Roman Reigns allowed Jey Uso to get his ass kicked again at the next pay per view, Sami Zayn threw Jeff Hardy’s fake Intercontinental Championship in the garbage along with his title aspirations, & Kevin Owens came over to Smackdown just to suffer a sudden vicious attack by a monster. I guess he finally knows how it feels.
Tonight’s show had BIG stakes going for it as there were a couple title matches, some hard hitting hoss fights & most importantly, The WWE Draft officially began. I’m going to do the show proper & draft in separate reviews in this post because trying to rank individual picks between the matches & promos sounds like way too much work. So let’s go ahead & get to the actual show first, then we’ll take a look at Smackdown’s impression of The Cleveland Browns front office after.
Assaulted & Battered
On a show with The Smackdown Women’s Title being defended, an impromptu Smackdown Tag Title Match & the first match The Fiend had ever wrestled on FOX, the falls count anywhere bout between Big E & Sheamus was the highlight of the whole thing. For all the grief Sheamus gets, that guy is severely underrated when it comes to how much he’s willing to take a beating to make his opponent look good. Big E also took his fair share of punishment too, with both guys going through car windshields that’s been the calling card of this entire feud. I think my favorite part was them fighting through the back into “Smackdown Catering” according to Graves, which was just bags of flour & dozens of eggs. You sure it just wasn’t New Day’s work station for their Pancake Intern? I hate to think that’s all they’re feeding their work force on top of everything else.
Big E pulls out another impressive singles win & remains undefeated since going solo, which I believe everybody is happy about. That’s three wins over Sheamus now, so maybe with The Draft, they can throw these guys up against some new opponents. Woods & Kofi show up after as E is interviewed backstage & it was nice to see all of them back together, even if it was so short lived. The silver lining about The New Day split is that it at least shows they’re serious about giving Big E a singles spotlight. He kind of got lost in the shuffle for a little bit there. Without the tag division to fall back to, he’ll be forced to make a push for singles title. I like the idea of Intercontinental Champion Big E. Let’s make that happen.
Insane Clown Posse
In a bit of perhaps shocking news, Kevin Owens & The Fiend put on a really good wrestling match. I really enjoy that fact that they’ve turned down the invincibility factor with The Fiend a couple notches. Before he was just no-selling everything to the point WWE put themselves into a corner with his matches & stuff like last year’s Hell In A Cell happened (They of course went too far the other way & Goldberg happened, but let’s not talk about that). Allowing his opponents to get believable offense in, even if they have no shot at winning, makes everybody look good as a result. The finish was really good too on top of everything else with Owens locked in The Mandible Claw & hitting a Stunner, only for The Fiend to keep it locked in for the victory.
The Bliss-Fiend stuff treads water this week with her being the harbinger for him & them hanging out at the end of the show under red lights. This angle has stalled a little bit & I want it to regain focus at some point. I’m willing to give them up through Hell In A Cell, but after that, we best have some sort of Joker-Harley duo beating up people with comically oversized mallets. Send up The Garganos & let’s see if Johnny will kick out at two with a smashed in head. He will, won’t he?
Big Dog’s Big I.Q.
The Big Dog’s quest to recreate Kennel From Hell without anybody noticing continues with him adding the stipulation that the Universal Title Match set for Hell In A Cell is now also an I Quit Match on top of being in The Cell itself. As much as WWE gets a ton of rightfully deserved flak for adding too many rules & giving you a headache, I actually really like this idea. Hell In A Cell already has three confirmed Cell Matches, with possibly a fourth in Mysterio-Rollins, so doing something to differentiate them is a must. You could probably just do the whole show in The Cell, but America is already under lethal lockdown, so that’d be a little much.
The I Quit add-on fits perfectly here as well given what happened at Clash Of Champions. If you didn’t catch that show, Reigns demanded Jey call him The Tribal Chief & wouldn’t pin him until he said it to the camera & in front of the world watching. Jey refused, so Reigns kept beating on him to the point Jimmy had to forfeit on his brother’s behalf. But Jey still never said the words Roman wanted. So now what does Roman do? Make a match where Jey has to say what he wants. It’s such a nice little layer of added assholery to Reigns’ character. He just can’t let it go even when he came out on top & soundly beat his opponent. The guy is really rounding into form with this new presentation & I can’t wait to see what they have planned for him in this Cell Match.
Charismatic Riddle
How do you guys think a team making their debut together & had never wrestled with each other did against a team that’s been established for years? If your answer was “The established team of course beat them soundly”, then I’m sorry, you very much don’t write for WWE.
“Broetry In Motion” (awful), the team of Matt Riddle & Jeff Hardy, roll through Miz & Morrison in what more or less amounts to a squash match. I don’t know how many different ways I can talk about MizMo’s losing streak, so let’s just hope RAW’s complete lack of a tag division can give them a soft reboot. I would’ve preferred they get split up, with Miz staying & Morrison going to RAW, but a change of scenery might work too. The Riddle & Hardy team could be fun as I think Hardy would be well served in a tag team to carry him for a while in his career twilight years, but I wouldn’t hate if that was just a one off either. It appears it’s the latter as the whole match looked to just be a set up for another surprise return, which, ugh, we’ll get to.
Bayl Out
Real quick, if you have time, check out Sasha’s promo from last week’s Talking Smack which is miles better than the one she did on last week’s Smackdown. Now that you’re excited about the feud again, let’s take a look at how tonight went.
From last week’s review:
Clearly, that’ll be some sort of schmozz finish to set up the real deal at the pay per view, but it feels like they’re trying to cram too much into a tight window with this feud…It’s already been marinating for the better part of a year. No reason to sprint to the finish line like this.
No way!
The obvious free tv bait & switch match happened with Bayley pulling pretty much the exact same thing she did with Asuka at Clash Of Champions. She gets a little bit overwhelmed, so decides to just hit her opponent with a chair & take the loss, but still remain champ. I’m not really loving Bayley turning into a coward champion all of a sudden. There was definitely some cheating going on before, but that at least turned into her pinning her opponents. Taking intentional losses & running away is a different level. There’s no reason for your champion who’s reign has been as long as this one has to all of a sudden be a chickenshit heel. Imagine if Drew McIntyre just decided to start taking count out victories in championship matches over on RAW after demolishing his challengers for six months straight. See? Doesn’t track.
Again, along with everything else on this show, the whole thing just serves as a segue to Sasha challenging Bayley to Hell In A Cell, just like we all knew was going to happen. I’m starting to notice a trend here. This is the problem with WWE trying to do too much. You’re in between ppvs & decide to do a draft. Nobody wants to watch just a wrestling draft, so you add a title match to that show that has no place there, with a finish everybody could see coming & undermines the story you’ve been telling for a year now. Like I said, let the thing breathe. Throw on Zayn against a new challenger or something instead. Nobody wanted this throwaway match.
New Day Brocks
*Deep fucking sigh*
Shout out to Cesaro & Shinsuke Nakamura for being transitional champions from New Day to… New Day! Great job, guys. All those months of good will you put into becoming a serious tag team threat was completely derailed in matter of minutes. We’ll always have The Champion’s Lounge.
As I mentioned before, Kofi & Woods make their return from injury earlier in the evening to surprise Big E & reunite New Day. I’m obviously happy they’re all back. Kofi was out for a couple months & Woods around a year, so seeing them return to action is great. What’s not great is them being out that long, showing back up & just getting a title match within thirty seconds. I understand they’re multiple time champions & the face of WWE tag team wrestling these past few years, but Cesaro & Nak defeated them FIVE times dating back to Extreme Rules. That makes them title contenders? Stop it.
The match itself is pretty good in a vacuum. Both Kofi & Woods look like they haven’t missed a beat, which was a welcome sight. Unfortunately, the whole thing is completely undercut by the obviousness of what’s happening. I said in real time during our live discussion thread that New Day is 100% winning this & then immediately will be drafted to RAW. Guess what happened! The most egregious part of the whole thing* is that it only served as a means to swerve everybody & break up New Day as a trio. I probably don’t hate the split as much as everybody else, only because singles Big E remains a thing, but what an absolute mess to get there. Congrats to Kofi & Woods now being The Smackdown Tag Team Champions of RAW. Nailed it again, WWE.
(*Note: The actual most egregious part of the whole thing is we’re getting Dollar Tree New Day in return in The Street Profits.)
The Freak Shows
The polar opposite of Kofi & Woods returning happens, when Lars Sullivan somehow escapes The Negative Zone & beats up 75% of the guys involved in the Riddle/Hardy vs. Miz/Morrison tag match. Lars was feuding with Lucha House Party before he was gone for a while, so good to see he’s still consistent with beating down guys in groups of three.
Your mileage on Sullivan may vary, but I’m not really into him. He was portrayed as this “Monster” in NXT, but that really only worked because the guys in NXT at the time were all much smaller than him with the Garganos & Adam Coles of the world. Here, he’s just another guy. Cole screams how he’s 6”3′, 330 lbs., but Riddle appears to be taller than him while barefoot & he’s listed at 6”2′, 235. It’s just a weird flex about a guy not being anywhere close to Monster status & running with it anyway. Add in all the stuff with Lars outside of the ring & there’s very little to like. I guess we’ll see how they position him this time around on the card, but Smackdown is already loaded as is, so no idea where he’s going to fit it.
P.S.
Stay Of Execution
Mocked Draft
Quick Night One Smackdown Draft Recap:
Who stayed: Roman Reigns, Sasha Banks, Jey Uso, Big E, Otis & Kalisto
Who left: AJ Styles, Naomi, The Miz, John Morrison, Kofi Kingston, Xavier Woods, Dana Brooke, Drew Gulak & Tucker
Who’s new: Seth Rollins, Bianca Belair, Rey Mysterio, Dominick Mysterio & Murphy
And then we have the WWE Draft, which is a whole conversation entirely. I don’t want to get into a huge rant about it, but I could probably write a full other article about the presentation of this concept. I don’t understand drafting RAW & Smackdown from scratch, especially when you have brand specific championships. It’s just another instance of WWE overcomplicating everything. There’s basically three rules to the whole thing: RAW gets three picks each round to Smackdown’s two, titles can be traded & teams can be drafted as a whole. Literally all of those get messed up in some way.
The shows do get the right amount of picks each round, but RAW ends up with twenty one people drafted to Smackdown’s eleven. RAW decides they want Smackdown’s Tag Titles for some reason, so are New Day the RAW or SD Tag Champions? Assuming The Street Profits get drafted to Smackdown, do they & New Day just trade belts in the hallway? And then there’s picking teams as a whole, unless they don’t. RAW takes The Hurt Business as is with all four guys, but for the infinitely better New Day, only take two thirds of them. It’d be one thing if they had a GM on either show to at least give us a couple lines of reasoning behind picks, but they just shrug it off & expect us to take it. Where the hell was NXT by the way?
I think a better way to do it would be to include all three shows & give them half a dozen picks each. Make it so they have to take a certain number of men, women & teams. With just a few moves, you can drastically shake up the look of each show’s divisions. If they just went with the picks from this show, you’d already have a totally different looking RAW & Smackdown. You don’t need to start each show from the ground up. Treat it like an actual sports draft with a limited number of picks for already established rosters. Make it like the night after WrestleMania when there would be a handful of NXT call ups for both shows, but just send some back to NXT as well. Now that I said I wouldn’t do a rant about The WWE Draft, I hope you enjoyed my rant about The WWE Draft.
As for the actual picks, I’m not going to break them down individually or anything. You can’t really project how they’re going to do because WWE can just decide to randomly push somebody or stick them in catering on a whim. The only real losses to Smackdown were Styles & New Day. I like mostly everybody else, but they weren’t doing anything on the show. Bianca Belair is a huge pickup, but I can’t get excited yet since I think she’s had three or four main roster matches total, even though she’s been on RAW for months. The stupidest fucking thing in the world was drafting the entirety of the Rollins/Murphy/Mysterios feud from one show to the other. Who at FOX saw that & wanted that hot garbage mess on their show? If pay per views aren’t going to blow off feuds anymore, you’d think the prospect moving people to different shows would give you the out. But nope, that never ending madness gets to continue on Fridays now. I like all four guys individually as picks, but holy shit, put them all in a Cell Match in a couple weeks & let’s end this nonsense already.
Overall
Worth Your Time: Falls Count Anywhere Match, The Fiend vs. Kevin Owens
If You Have Time: Smackdown Tag Team Title Match, Reigns’ promo
Don’t Waste Time: Smackdown Women’s Title Match, The Draft, Riddle/Hardy vs. Miz/Morrison
So there’s your Smackdown. While it was touted as a big time affair, the show was more filler or middle steps to something down the line than anything else. Sorry for all the complaining, but WWE can do that to a man. Hell In A Cell is thankfully around the corner & if it doesn’t serve to end some of these current WWE feuds, I’m not sure anything will. The Draft continues Monday, so let’s hope The Blue Side can weather the storm of losing a lot of talent from tonight & get some good things back, particularly in the women’s & tag divisions. How’d you like the show? Did WWE’s picks match your big board? Feel free to comment or hit up our Discord! Lucky for me (and possibly you), my columns will be a lot shorter going forward now that Smackdown has to dedicate an hour to Rollins/Mysterio recap videos. Rejoice! Join us Monday where RAW probably drafts Sami Zayn & keeps The Street Profits, then just has twelve championships titles. Fun!
