Posted in: Sports, TV, WWE | Tagged: clash of champions, Raw, Smackdown, wrestling, wwe, wwe draft
WWE Announces New Draft to Start on Smackdown Next Week
At Clash of Champions tonight, WWE announced a brand new draft to shake up the rosters of Raw and Smackdown. The draft will kick off on Smackdown next Friday and will continue on Raw the following Monday. The draft will apparently include all of the champions, so anyone is up for grabs.
WWE also confirmed the news on Twitter, writing, "The future is on the clock. The 2020 #WWEDraft begins Friday, October 9 on #SmackDown and continues Monday, October 12 on #WWERaw!
WWE last held an official draft in 2019, and the time before that was 2016 with the reintroduction of the WWE brand split, which keeps the rosters of Raw and Smackdown separate. The 2019 draft was part of Smackdown's move to the Fox broadcast network last year. But despite the brand split and the network TV deal, WWE's ratings have been suffering, with the pandemic only adding to a downward trend that's lasted two decades. The general consensus is that boring storylines are to blame, despite WWE's attempts to blame everything from Paul Heyman to a lack of LCD screens arranged in the audience to look like a Zoom meeting vomited.
I'm not sure that moving the superstars of Raw and Smackdown to different shows will do much to change that, but it's better than watching the same matches we've seen over and over and over and over again for the foreseeable future. Even here on Clash of Champions, half of the matches seem like ones we've already seen a half dozen times at minimum in the last year. Nakamura and Cesaro vs. Lucha House Party, Bayley vs. Nikki Cross (replaced by Bayley vs. Asuka), Bobby Lashley vs. Apollo Crews, and even Drew McIntyre vs. Randy Orton are all stale feuds because WWE has had the participants facing each other every week for months. So at a bare minimum, WWE will have a whole new set of matchups to beat into the ground for the rest of the year, so I guess I'm in favor of a WWE Draft.