It was a disappointing week for WWE Smackdown this week as they delivered a show full of short matches that didn’t mean a whole lot and one of the most predictable main events of the year with Shinsuke Nakamura teaming up with Randy Orton to beat Rusev and Jinder Mahal. What did that mean for the Smackdown ratings this week? Not good news.
This week’s Smackdown did 2.455 million viewers according to Showbuzz Daily. That number is disappointing considering last week’s show did 2.685 million viewers, so it’s a loss of over 200,000 viewers this week. Bad sign? Sure, but last week’s show was also the highest in three months and it followed a major event like SummerSlam. It was unrealistic to think they could hit that number again. It is bad that they dipped under 2.5 million viewers, though.
Looking into the numbers a little deeper, the 2.455 million for this week’s show is the lowest since the July 4 episode with 2.3 million viewers. That week had a valid excuse since it is United States Independence Day. The two weeks before that both beat this week’s Smackdown, so really if you want to be picky then the last Smackdown that was worse than this week was from June 13, which is a show that went up against the NBA Finals. In other words, WWE shouldn’t be happy with this number at all.
They’re tag team partners tonight, but NEXT WEEK @RandyOrton and @ShinsukeN will be at opposite sides of the ring! #SDLive pic.twitter.com/c4t7CVEayQ
— WWE (@WWE) August 30, 2017
Next week’s Smackdown already has a major matchup advertised with Shinsuke Nakamura facing Randy Orton for the first time ever. The winner of that match gets a shot at Jinder Mahal’s WWE Championship in the future. Orton already fired the first shot by hitting Nakamura with a RKO after they won their tag match this week.
A match as big as Orton vs. Nakamura should help get the viewership number back over the 2.5 million people range. If not, it would be a bad sign and WWE needs to get back to doing what made Smackdown great earlier this year because the fans are clearly noticing the dip in quality. We don’t want to see it get worse.
