This has been quite the whirlwind month for WWE, to say the absolute least. I’m gonna go ahead and recap it here just to highlight what a historic – in good ways and bad – month this October has been. Who knows? Might end up making a monthly feature out of this. Depends on how newsworthy the months are!
Simple key; green text means good, red text means bad, with the dark yellow being a neutral.
October 2nd – NXT goes head-to-head with the inaugural episode of AEW Dynamite.
The first week of the Wednesday Night Wars. NXT attempted to combat the hype of Dynamite with a loaded card built weeks in advance, a two-week headstart on USA, a few minutes of overrun and advertised limited commercial interruption. This mostly revolved around the the first 30 minutes, in which Adam Cole’s NXT title defense against Matt Riddle, and the shock return of Finn Balor which followed, went entirely uninterrupted.
Despite their best efforts, this was a loss. Dynamite’s debut averaged a shocking 1.4 million viewers, beating out NXT’s 891k. This included doubling them in the much coveted 18-49 demo.
October 4th – Friday Night SmackDown makes it’s much anticipated debut on FOX.
After what seemed like well over a year of rumblings, and several more months after official announcements were made, it finally occurred. SmackDown premiered live on FOX, what was thought to be the start of a boom period. They mainly advertised two major matches, Kevin Owens and Shane McMahon in a ladder match with Shane’s career on the line, and Kofi Kingston defending the WWE Championship against Brock Lesnar. In addition, they promised appearances from a cavalcade of stars. Advertised guest appearances included The Rock, Brock Lesnar, Sting, The Undertaker, Steve Austin, Kurt Angle, Mick Foley, Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Bill Goldberg, Booker T, Lita, Trish Stratus, Mark Henry, Jerry Lawler and on and on…
The rating for the night was a pretty solid. They drew 3,888,000 viewers, and that was with the Dish Network, one of the top television providers, not carrying FOX that week due to a snafu. Without that, I have no doubt that it would’ve been much higher, and find myself mentally declaring this to be 4 million viewers. For WWE in 2019, that’s pretty crazy.
The reception to the show however, was pretty poor. While the Rock was there and involved in a fun segment that of course didn’t end up building to anything in particular, none of the other guests did anything of note. In fact, most weren’t even actually there! Foley, Angle, Hogan and Flair were spotted in the crowd and that’s about it. The likes of Steve Austin, The Undertaker and Sting were all available but were told to go home, not even appearing before the live crowd who came to see them. In addition to this, beloved WWE Champion Kofi Kingston was squashed in a matter of seconds by Lesnar, destroying his credibility as a main eventer forever, in what honestly felt like pure spite booking.
The debuts of Tyson Fury and Cain Velasquez were solid. The segments themselves were fine, and they were pretty major names to get themselves some coverage. However many just saw this as yet another instance of WWE promoting people who won’t be around very often, in front of their biggest audience of the year. The live crowd was ultimately unhappy with the show and the false advertising to the point of chanting “AEW” after the show went off the air.
October 6th – Hell In A Cell, featuring the popular new sensation The Fiend challenging Seth Rollins for the Universal Championship.
This show unfortunately found itself with a hideous finish that will be talked of as a stain on both men, as well as the Hell In A Cell concept for a time to come. Rollins repeated use of weapons culminating in a sledgehammer shot caused the match to be stopped. It was interpreted by many as a DQ within a Cell match, given that it saw the referee demand Seth stop only to be ignored, before immediately calling for the bell. This thought was furthered by one of WWE’s own social media accounts backing up the possibility of a DQ in the match earlier in the day. WWE have since vehemently denied this, calling it a referee stoppage, but even that does some damage to the Cell’s reputation, establishing forever that there is indeed such a thing as going too far for Hell In A Cell.
Moreover, the audience revolted because they really, really wanted to see the Fiend win the Universal title. It was the obvious correct choice, and you couldn’t really get a much more fitting occasion than doing it inside the once legendary steel confines. But it was not to be. The backlash at the finish was immediate and impossible to ignore. Chants of “Bullsh-t”, “Restart The Match” and for the second time in a matter of days, “AEW” rang out as the show closed.
October 11th to October 14th – 2019 WWE Draft
After the Wild Card gimmick became a punchline in a matter of weeks and completely destroyed any credibility behind the brand extension concept, just before SmackDown was supposed to become the A-Show at that, WWE realized that they needed to right the ship. The draft was meant to re-establish which side everyone was on, since many people had all but forgotten, given how quickly the Wild Card rule came into play after the last Superstar Shake-Up.
It was also obviously an attempt to try and retain some of the viewers from the Fox premiere, since they knew week 2 was going to be waaaaaay below week 1 in normal circumstances.
This was basically a disappointment across the board. Because of their attempt to spread the Draft amongst both main roster shows, they introduced a Draft Pool concept. This led to a lack of one big name after another getting picked, in the vein that a usual draft would go. It also eliminated a lot of stories that could be told, and indeed no angle really surfaced as a result of anyone’s placement. In addition, many people were ‘drafted’ to the same show they were already on. It basically treated things like the entire roster was made up of free agents thanks to the Wild Card rule. But since they never really wanted to establish that, because frankly the whole circumstance made them look extremely incompetent, what you had was SmackDown superstar Roman Reigns being drafted to SmackDown, Raw superstar Seth Rollins being drafted to Raw and so on.
The actual number of notable moves was probably comparable to usual drafts from back when this was annual. But back then, those were the only names announced on TV and they didn’t have to cut them in half to stretch it two shows, which meant they felt much more newsworthy. In addition, the shows themselves weren’t all that great, mostly remembered for the over-the-top war room clips with fake Fox and USA executives. They sadly only filmed enough of them for SmackDown, but replayed them on Raw anyway and assumed no one would notice everyone having the same reactions and wearing the same clothes. Also, the ratings still fell by quite a bit, with week 2 of SmackDown having nearly a million less viewers, even with Dish Network coming back into the equation.
October 15th – Executive Director of SmackDown Eric Bischoff is fired.
Literally a day after the Draft’s conclusion, Eric Bischoff was let go, less than half a year after being appointed to the job which supposedly, technically, kinda sorta put him in charge of the blue brand. Many jokes were made of how unhappy they must’ve been with the draft picks to do this.
Bischoff is largely seen as a scapegoat for WWE’s failures. His nomination always felt like that of a figurehead to begin with. Nobody that’s seriously followed Bischoff as a decision maker for the last two decades could possibly think he would’ve been a good choice for the role. He’s a guy who did some good work in WCW for a couple of years, then drove it off a cliff in spite of having every advantage in the world at his disposal. Then he took a peaking TNA and helped send it to the depths that it is only just now crawling out of. But the thought was raised, and seemingly backed up in the coming weeks, that he wasn’t there to be part of the day-to-day operations, so much as a mouth piece to speak with network executives. This is one of the few things that he’s still considered good at.
It was also always floated around that, should WWE disappoint on Fox, Bischoff would be an easy one to get rid of, in a show that they were making change and things would improve. The reality is that this affects very little, but does give a hint as to how both WWE and Fox felt about the situation.
October 16th to October 17th – WWE tries and fails to buy out NOAH and Stardom in an effort to create NXT Japan.
In one of the more curious news stories of the month, it came out that WWE were trying to buy out notable Japanese promotions, so as to transform them into NXT Japan. These included Pro Wrestling NOAH, by some measurements the second biggest wrestling promotion in Japan, and World Wonder Ring Stardom, a relatively small but very reputable Joshi federation. Basically it seems like they would’ve fused the rosters of the two companies to form the basis of a Japanese NXT branch, similar to what NXT UK has become.
These fell through, partially because a Japanese company selling to an American one is seen as poor form in their culture, and partially because they seemed to have a lack of planning for how NXT Japan would actually work.
In what can’t be a coincidence, New Japan’s parent company acquired Stardom days later, only to allow it to more or less operate as normal. This can be seen as a defensive maneuver to block it from ever being in negotiations with WWE again.
This is a fairly major loss for WWE. Like I said, NOAH is a major promotion in Japan. Had this succeeded, this would’ve basically allowed them to skip a ton of stages of growth and give themselves a major foothold in Japan right off the bat. As things stand, they’ve seemingly changed their attentions to trying to buy Dragon Gate now, still not giving up on this idea.
October 25th – SmackDown pre-empted to FS1 due to Fox’s coverage of the MLB World Series.
By default, this was an unfortunate break for WWE, though one they have to have known well in advance was going to happen. Even if they kept those 4 million viewers every week, they weren’t about to drop the World Series for SmackDown, that just would’ve been silly. But it has to be said that, just four weeks in, this wasn’t a great time to take the downgrade in networks.
Everybody in the know expected a big decline, and it was agreed in advance that the rating for this episode wouldn’t be taken all that seriously, even with them advertising Hogan, Flair, Lesnar and Valasquez to try and load it as much as they could to stem the tide.
Still… the rating that came out was way, way below even conservative estimates. 888,000 viewers. There’s just no explaining that number, it’s frightfully low, about half what some were expecting, even when accounting for jumping to FS1 in combination with competition from the World Series. There are gonna be a lot of eyes on the rating for tomorrow’s SmackDown, to say the very least…
October 27th – NXT Superstar Jordan Myles goes public with a tirade about a WWE-produced piece of merchandise that he finds racially offensive.
Yyyyyep. This would see WWE and Myles each try to discredit each other. Myles began as a heavily supported figure until his intensifying tirades ended up attacking ROH as well, referring to Jay Lethal as an Uncle Tom. This crossed a line for a lot of people and, to say the least, this situation was a negative for absolutely everyone.
October 31st – WWE Crown Jewel 2019.
To cap off the month, we have… a return to Saudi Arabia. That’s a downer for many right off the bat, for reasons too complicated for this short space.
But in the wee hours of the AM the day before, a bright spot occurred, as one of those many reasons came to an end. Lacey Evans and Natalya squared off in the first-ever women’s match in Saudi Arabia, which is a big plus for humanity.
Then, to start off the show, Brock Lesnar effectively ended Cain Velasquez with a submission two minutes in, putting the promising crossover star’s value in jeopardy after his very first match, and prematurely ending one of the better built and more storied yet fresh angles they had going.
To cap off the night, the Fiend defeated Seth Rollins in a Falls Count Anywhere match to claim the title he really, really should’ve won weeks earlier. There is serious risk here of it being too little, too late, but I do think the Fiend can be salvaged from here. He survived okay in the immediate aftermath of the Hell In A Cell debacle, so his star is a hard one to kill.
So, that was a lot of red and very little green. All in all, what was meant to be a monumental month for WWE turned into one disaster after another for the most part. They may still be in a better place now then when they began the month but that shouldn’t even be in question with everything they had lined up. That boom period looks pretty far away, atleast as far as WWE is concerned. Fortunately, pro wrestling as a whole seems to be experiencing a boom all it’s own, one that actually did come into motion during October.
