As of earlier this week, WWE planned to have the SmackDown Live Women’s Championship match as one of the three matches on the pre-WrestleMania 33 kickoff show. It was set to join the Austin Aries vs. Neville contest for the Cruiserweight Championship and the Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal.
In all fairness, with the number of matches slated for this year’s WrestleMania spectacular, the matches chosen for the show before the show did make sense.
One could argue that the only other match that would fit on the kickoff show would be Dean Ambrose vs. Baron Corbin for the Intercontinental Championship, as that match has received very little on-air build and hasn’t seen the most inspired storyline leading into Sunday’s bout.
Their final confrontation was a split screen interview where they spent 5 minutes telling each other to shut up like a couple of 5-year-olds.
The Cruiserweight Championship
The Cruiserweight Division has been improving as of late in terms of what WWE has been doing with them, but with the necessity of putting something on the kickoff show, the Aries-Neville match makes sense.
The CW roster has been seeing very little airtime, and until the Gallagher vs. Neville match at Fastlane, has also been given very little time to tell stories in their matches outside of their own show on Tuesday nights.
Despite the strong reactions Austin Aries, and to a lesser extent, Neville, have been receiving over the past month, when there are other matches that have been built for a longer period of time, those matches need to make the main card.
It would be great to see this match featured on the main card, and if you remember, when the Cruiserweight Title was last defended at WrestleMania people were up in arms about the stipulation.
It was WrestleMania XX, over 13 years ago, and it was defended in the Cruiserweight Open, which was a king of the mountain style gauntlet match that saw 9 eliminations out of a field of 10 wrestlers in an 11-minute match.
Also read: WWE WrestleMania 33: Top 5 Best kickoff show matches in event's history
That was on the main card. The only other time the CW Title was defended at WrestleMania was the year before at WrestleMania XIX, at which Matt Hardy successfully defended his title in the opening match against Rey Mysterio. It was only a 5-minute match, and people were upset about that one as well.
Is it right that the Cruiserweight Championship has been treated as a second-class championship since its initial run in WWE? Of course not.
All titles should be perceived to be prestigious and worth fighting for. But in the grand scheme of things, this was to be expected. Something has to go on the kickoff show, and there wasn’t enough room on the main show for this match to make the cut.
Austin Aries said it best, noting that he isn’t being relegated to the kickoff show. The kickoff show is being elevated because he’s being featured as a part of it. That is the best way to look at a situation like this one.
The Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal
When WWE debuted the Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal, it was just a rebranding of the oft-occurring battle royal that took place before WrestleMania that existed solely to get more people on the card.
Associating the name of a legendary wrestler doesn’t make the match any more meaningful. It’s an illusion.
That’s not a bad thing, but it’s important to call it what it is. This year marks the fourth annual edition of the rebranded “get everyone on the show” match, and the second time it will be held on the kickoff show.
It’s an unimportant match, with the inaugural winner, Cesaro, being catapulted backwards after winning the match rather than receiving some momentum and a push in the right direction after he won the trophy.
The following year saw The Big Show take home the big trophy, and it was clear that the match, which took place on the pre-show, was nothing more than a way to get people on the card.
It had potential to be more than that, but a Big Show victory by last eliminating the super popular Damien Mizdow character was a missed opportunity and the solidification of the match being meaningless in the long run, or the short run, for that matter.
If it had been Big Show’s final match, which was rumoured at the time, it would have meant something, but that did not turn out to be the case.
Finally, last year’s bout saw NXT alum Baron Corbin make his WWE main roster debut with zero warning, entering to barely any crowd reaction because nobody expected him to be there and he hadn’t exactly been lighting the world on fire in NXT.
The match did make it to the main card, and Corbin won by last eliminating Kane. It was a victory that was from pretty far out of left field, but not the worst way to introduce a new, big man to the WWE roster. The problem was, just like in the two years prior, the victory didn’t mean very much.
For a couple of months WWE set up the trophy at ringside for Corbin’s matches, but the matches themselves were all pretty inconsequential and did nothing to further his career.
After the trophy disappeared, he continued to be announced as the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal winner, but it didn’t launch him into the stratosphere. He was just another guy on the roster having average-at-best matches in a stilted, poor storyline with Dolph Ziggler.
This year the trophy will probably go to Braun Strowman, because that makes the most sense, and WWE will make a big deal about it for a couple of months but that won’t enhance Braun’s status in the company.
He will continue to be a big guy without much direction, swallowed up on the RAW roster that has too many other names ahead of him to allow him to break out in a meaningful way.
The SmackDown Live Women’s Championship
This match is no longer scheduled to be on the kickoff show, but rather the main card. That’s great news, as all 6 women in the match have worked very hard to earn a shot at showing what they can do on the biggest stage possible.
But, in the interest of playing devil’s advocate, with a 13-match card you can only showcase so many matches on the main show, so something has to go on the 2-hour pre-show.
As I stated earlier, the only other match that could have been placed on the kickoff outside of the Battle Royal and the Cruiserweight match would have been Baron Corbin vs. Dean Ambrose for the IC Title, specifically due to the lacklustre build for the match and the lack of buzz leading up to the contest.
After Naomi went down with an injury, WWE was left with a void to fill in the SmackDown LIVE Women’s division. The path was clearly leading toward the Orlando native defending her newly-won Women’s Championship in front of her friends and family in her hometown.
When that became an improbability due to the champion’s injury, WWE was forced to have her relinquish the belt, and they had to start over from scratch in regards to planning their Women’s Championship match for WrestleMania 33.
It proved to be a difficult position because until the final episode of SmackDown before ‘Mania, there was no set stipulation for the match.
Alexa Bliss, the new champion, was scheduled to defend her title in a vague match, taking on all available female wrestlers on the SmackDown roster.
It took a couple of weeks for any names to actually be announced for the match, and it looked like they were probably going to go into the show with surprise entrants that would just show up when the match took place on April 2.
Would it be a gauntlet match? Some kind of elimination match? A battle royal? WWE didn’t give any indication as to what they had planned, likely because until they knew that until Naomi was cleared to return, they didn’t have a plan set in stone.
By the time she was cleared, time was running out and they booked whatever match they could, and it turned out to be the 6-pack challenge.
Because of the wishy-washy booking and utter confusion surrounding the match, it felt fitting that if time constraints were going to be an issue, this would be one of the matches to be placed on the kickoff show.
Is it fair to the women who have busted their asses for the last 8 months trying to make the SD Live Women’s Title into a meaningful belt? No, of course not. The same goes for the Cruiserweight Title, but sometimes things don’t always turn out the way we would have liked.
In the end, though, the WWE Universe scored a victory, as the very vocal social media crowd was very displeased when they found out that the match would not be on the main card, and a hashtag campaign swelled up until WWE changed their minds and decided to feature the match on the main card instead.
I am very glad it got changed, but I would have accepted it based on sound reasoning if it stayed the way it was.
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