Rasslin’ City Ransom
By Scott Keith on 7 February 2018
I attended this week's SmackDown! Live in Kansas City and it was a pretty dreadful live show, nearly a complete 180 from a fun Raw in Des Moines the night before.
SmackDown! felt like a lot of filler until they went off the air at 9:00. At that point the ring announcer immediately announced that A.J. Styles & Shinsuke Nakamura would face Baron Corbin & Jinder Mahal in the main event. A.J. was the only one of these four to even make an appearance thus far, so if fans wanted to see the hometown hero Corbin or Rumble winner Nakamura, they were going to have to sit through 75 minutes of Mixed Match Challenge and 205 Live first.
The matches on MMC and 205 Live were all entertaining, but as the show dragged on people were clearly ready to call it a night. The ring announcer kept reminding everyone that the big tag team match was coming up soon, which kept most around but definitely not all. (At least one child and one adult in my section dozed off.)
The question I have from all of this is that would WWE deliberately leave people off of their TV show in order to keep fans in the building for their failed Network show? I can't think of any better explanation as to why The Ascension and Bludgeon Brothers got more TV time than Shinsuke Nakamura this week.
P.S. When the crowd is THAT quiet for Hideo Itami and Roderick Strong beating the shit out of each other like they were, it's pretty clear that 205 Live is beyond saving.