Welcome back to another Monday Morning Q&A where I toss out some questions to get a feel of how you guys and gals are feeling about certain topics.
So here are 5 questions I’d like to toss out for this week. I’ll give my answers, too, but the key here is that I want to know what YOU think! So make sure you chime in!
1) Crown Jewel will take place this Thursday afternoon, but Bianca Belair fights Charlotte Flair for the Raw Women’s Championship on Raw tonight. How do you think the two women’s titles will play out with Flair and Becky Lynch on opposite brands at the moment?
I can’t imagine Belair wins the Raw title and they not only take the title off Flair, but that they also spoil that Sasha Banks would then have to win the match at Crown Jewel. That would be the only way to do it if that were the case, and I don’t think we’re getting Belair vs. Banks at Survivor Series, either.
I’m imagining Belair fails to beat Flair due to some sort of interference from Lynch or Banks (or both). Then, Becky retains at Crown Jewel. They do the thing they did last year with the tag team titles where the opposite brands don’t want the wrong colors, so they just have Adam Pearce and Sonya Deville swap belts for them and they count that as an extra title reign for both of them to help boost Flair’s number in particular.
2) Not tomorrow night, but next Tuesday will be Halloween Havoc. As it stands, the NXT Championship, NXT Women’s Championship and NXT Women’s Tag Team Championships will be on the line. Do you think any of these belts will change hands?
Part of me thinks all three will. SmackDown feels as though it needs at least one or two more women, and I’m imagining a scenario where Io Shirai and Zoey Stark drop the tag titles, Raquel Gonzalez drops the women’s title to Mandy Rose, and Toxic Attraction gets a big push while Shirai and Gonzalez get moved up to the blue brand.
Bron Breakker has had a strong push. Tommaso Ciampa is part of the old guard and doesn’t fit in the mold of this NXT 2.0 youth movement rebranding. While I ultimately think there’s more of a chance the women’s titles change than that Ciampa drops his belt, it shouldn’t shock me at all if Breakker becomes champion, too.
3) We keep hearing Roman Reigns take shots at AEW, Tony Khan talk trash about WWE and so on. Do these matter to you? If Top Dolla drops a diss track about The Young Bucks, does it make you more/less interested, like either entity more, boost your fandom for wrestling in general or does it just not register to you?
I only care if it’s something particularly good. If Reigns says he’s not interested in a CM Punk match, I write that off as a “whatever” just the same as I no longer get buzzed if Khan says he has the superior product to Vince McMahon, because of course he’s going to say that (and in many ways, he’d be right, in my opinion). But if someone does something outside the box, there’s potential for me to love it.
For instance, John Silver and Alex Reynolds trying to pitch to Adam Cole that he should change his name because there already is an Adam in the company and saying “And are you related to Michael Cole?” on Being the Elite got a big chuckle out of me. That type of ribbing is great. Flat out just continually talking about “the wrestling war” is overplayed, though, and general shots just don’t seem like a big deal anymore.
4) Ideally, WWE should have made Supersized SmackDown a big enough show that it felt special and had a great rating on FS1. Instead, it did rather poorly. How did you perceive the show?
Overall, it felt meh, despite how some parts were good. For having an extra 30 minutes, they filled a ton of the time with recaps, vignettes, promos and unnecessary content like that. I didn’t need Edge AND Seth Rollins to both cut promos reminding me of what’s already happened in the feud and not pushing that story any further, for instance. And why was Happy Talk a thing when it was a few jokes, some shots at Kevin Owens, Rick Boogs interrupting with Shinsuke Nakamura and it all just led to The Street Profits coming out for their tag team match?
Some of the wrestling was good. If they had had more of that and more of a draw other than another contract signing that took 15 minutes for 1 line to be said, which was just going back to the “can Reigns trust Paul Heyman?” well again, maybe it would have performed better. To me, this was WWE’s “this is good enough” attempt and it clearly wasn’t good enough for people to tune in. Maybe learn from this and try harder to reel them in next time with more than “Brock will be there and he’ll sign some papers” and “you’ll see Becky vs. Sasha again”. Despite how great they are, I’ve seen it, so what’s the draw in yet another rerun?
5) DC Fandome showed off some footage for John Cena’s upcoming Peacemaker television series and The Rock’s Black Adam film. As fans of pro wrestling, are you interested in either of these projects? If so, is it because Cena and The Rock are in them, or because you’re already into the DC stuff to begin with? If not, elaborate on why the wrestlers don’t do enough to draw you in.
I’m already a superhero junkie, so I was down for these no matter what. Even though Peacemaker was a character I knew relatively nothing about prior to Suicide Squad and Black Adam has never been someone I thought should get his own movie, both look like they have some potential. If this weren’t John Cena and/or The Rock, though, I’d still be interested. However, Cena killed it in Suicide Squad and The Rock was, for all intents and purposes, always the best choice for Black Adam, so this is kind of the best case scenario for me.
Look out for potential reviews down the line, as I’ll be scoping these out on their premieres.
Let us know your thoughts about these questions by answering them in the comments!
