As seen during Sunday night’s WWE Royal Rumble pay-per-view event, Charlotte Flair won the women’s Royal Rumble match. She then cut a promo on RAW, noting that she wasn’t ready to pick which champion she’d be facing at WrestleMania 36. There are rumors that it’ll be Charlotte Flair vs. Rhea Ripley for the NXT Championship.
According to reports, the main reason for Flair vs. Ripley is so that WWE can add some “main roster credibility” to NXT again. During the WWE Survivor Series pay-per-view build, several NXT Superstars appeared on RAW and SmackDown and vice versa. This caused the NXT ratings to rise. Since then, the NXT numbers have continued to drop and WWE wants to try to bring them back up again. They feel that bringing main roster talents to the show will just do that, as that’s what happened during Survivor Series.
There were some people in WWE who believed that the idea of AEW vs. NXT as a “prime concern” was over. Both Triple H and Vince McMahon originally didn’t think AEW would have strong enough numbers to get a paying TV deal and they would eventually just go away. That thought process backfired though as TNT recently renewed AEW through 2023. The new deal is for $45 million per year, much more than what the USA Network is currently paying for NXT.
