Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown Live: The Royal Rumble happened, and Shinsuke Nakamura won it all. He’ll be headed to WrestleMania to face AJ Styles for the WWE Championship in a match everyone wants to see, unless his dreaded rival ridiculous booking stops him before then.
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And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Smackdown Live for January 30, 2018.
Best: Rusev Is Getting A (United States) Title Shot!
Firstly and most importantly this week, the impossibly over-right-now homie Al Rusev won a fatal four-way to name a new number one contender for the United States Championship. His opponents were Jinder Mahal, who spent most of last year as WWE Champion; Kofi Kingston, who spent most of last year as Tag Team Champion; and Zack Ryder, who I’m pretty sure hasn’t won a match since he returned and should at best be competing to eat out of the garbage when everyone else is done at catering.
This sets up the best moment on the entire show, which is Rusev challenging the United States Champion in one of those weird handheld Mixed Match Challenge pop-up videos and calling him BAHBROOD. Roode responds via CALENDAR SHENANIGANS. I’m not sure I’m all-in on these primary color words popping up as they speak or the Instagram story-esque backstage segments, but I do love that (1) they seem improvised, which is a 1000% improvement over almost all pre-written promos, (2) they’re almost always attempting to be fun, and (3) they limit the appearance of backstage interviewers and their post-interview thousand yard stares. Good stuff.
Note: I know this is probably just a placeholder match to set something up for Fastlane (or stall for time until they decide what they want to do with the U.S. title at WrestleMania), but I’d kill for this to be a double-turn. They haven’t done a real double-turn in a long time, and no situation is more ready for it than Rusev and Bahbrood. Rusev is getting cheered over even the biggest stars in the company right now, and Roode’s best pro wrestling quality is his ability to be a condescending dickhead. The fact that Rusev’s still more or less considered a heel and Roode’s a pandering babyface is Un Chien Andalou-level confusing.
Worst: Pushing Ten
The lowlight of this week’s Smackdown for me had to be the match between Baron Corbin and Tye Dillinger. It’s one of those bottle episode stories where WWE presents an idea — Tye Dillinger deserves some revenge for what happened to him at the Royal Rumble — and immediately parlays it into something completely different that nerfs the logical momentum. Instead of Dillinger maybe getting a title shot on Smackdown or at least getting a match against Sami Zayn (or even Kevin Owens), he gets into an unsolicited argument with Baron Corbin, and they have a match. Which lasts like five minutes, and Dillinger loses. So they could’ve just announced “Baron Corbin will be taking on Tye Dillinger” and re-purposed what happened at the Rumble for a future grudge. Or something.
I guess the good news here is that the Road to WrestleMania has both Raw and Smackdown mostly back on track, which means my biggest complaint about the episode is “I wish the story had gone somewhere,” and not like, “this makes me so mad I want to go out into the parking lot and try to flip all the cars.”
Best: New Gulak
Uce and Uce cut a promo challenging a new team to step up and face them, and are coincidentally (cough) interrupted by the entrance of the Bludgeon Brothers. Aiming these two teams at one another is a good idea right now, because the Usos have beaten everybody else, and the Bludgies are (at least as the Bludgies) undefeated. Part of me wants them to win the Smackdown Tag Team Championship at Fastlane, Braun Strowman to win the Universal Championship at WrestleMania, and Mania to end with Bray Wyatt sitting by himself backstage eating a pint of ice cream, laughing to himself until he starts crying.
But yeah, Bludge and Other Bludge come up against the spectacular jobber squadron of ECWA Mid-Atlantic Champion Chris Wylde — no, not that Chris Wylde — and the Amazing Rory Gulak, brother of Drew, who is great but also kinda looks like a bad Mattel scan of Cesaro. The Bludgeon Brothers win, in case you didn’t watch the show and were really wondering.
Best: The Fashion Files Is Back, Sort Of!
The Fashion Files has been stuck on YouTube for the past several weeks, so even if it was just a backstage segment to set up a match, it was nice to see Tyler Breeze, Fandango and the Ascension (in reading glasses!) together again on the show proper.
Breezango takes on Shelton Benjamin and wonderful athletic a-hole Chadwick Gable, and much like the backstage bit that set it up, it was fun, but too short. It only lasts about three minutes and Breeze takes another pin, but at this point I’ll take my Breeze and Fandango content where I can get it. Plus, at least they got to look more competitive than they did wrestling the Bludgeon Brothers for a month, and Gable and Benjamin are too good a team for “two straight losses in a 2-out-of-3 falls match” to be the end of their run at the tag straps.
I’d say all of this is building to a tag team turmoil match at WrestleMania, but (1) that would probably be on the WrestleMania pre-show, not “WrestleMania,” and (2) it’d steal like 12 guys from the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal. Maybe at Fastlane?
This Week In The Smackdown Women’s Division
Whoops, sorry, that’s another Ronda Rousey video. How did that get in here?
Here we go. Charlotte Flair cuts a promo about the women’s Royal Rumble match and puts over [checks notes] Ronda Rousey, who needs it. That brings out the Riott Squad to shade her for being full of herself, because she’s a Flair, and that sets up two (2) 3-on-1 attacks. Charlotte wins the first fight, but the Squad smartly sticks around and regroups to take her out. That brings out Carmella, and I’ll be honest, her running down to the ring made me open up Slack and make sure our UPROXX team was on top of a potential cash-in. The idea that Charlotte would’ve missed out on the history-making Royal Rumble only to fuck up and lose her belt two days later would’ve been a really layered story for her heading into WrestleMania.
Instead, because Carmella, we get an accidental ref bump and a rescinding of the Money in the Bank cash-in. That’s fine, I guess, as it mostly serves to remind us about that briefcase she’s always carrying around and what it does. I still think the most fun booking would’ve been to give Carmella the Royal Rumble win, have her lose to Charlotte at WrestleMania, then immediately wallop her with the briefcase, cash it in for a second championship chance, and pin her.
Neither Yep Nor Nope: The Festival Of Fiendship
Finally this week we have the unfortunately flat and uneventful blockbuster main event of Shinsuke Nakamura and AJ Styles versus Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens. If I could offer one easy fix for Smackdown, it would be to stop having these tag team main events. They’re never as good as you want them to be, because they’re almost always built on 90 minutes of content between the opening and closing of a show. The wrestlers don’t really have any motivations besides “tell the next part of the story,” and they’re clearly so preoccupied with that that the wrestling becomes extremely “house show,” and they rarely give us something memorable. Which is INSANE considering the amount of talent involved here.
Again, it’s not bad — God bless WrestleMania season for upping the quality of these shows so much that even the stuff I disliked didn’t make me a fussy Internet person — but it’s built around a Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn breakup swerve we know isn’t going to happen. Not yet, anyway. Daniel Bryan put them in a one-on-one match for next week to see which one of them will challenge for the WWE Championship next, so if we’re doing ANY kind of breakup story, it won’t happen until much later. Remember how they teased Owens and Jericho ending their friendship for months and months before finally doing the Festival of Friendship? Same deal.
I’d love to be wrong, though. I’d love for them to build to a heel Sami Zayn versus a (somehow) babyface Kevin Owens heading into WrestleMania, both to give us those two in a one-on-one match at Mania and to shake up the dynamic so we aren’t doing the same patterns forever. We’ll have to wait and see, though. And maybe let’s not put a guy in the main event of Smackdown if he’s also wrestling in the Mixed Match Challenge, aired live immediately following Smackdown?
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week
Amaterasu’s Son
Daniel, playing the long game, has decided to just take Sami and KO out the only way he can. By sicking them on each other. Shane would never understand this.
AshBlue
Daniel Bryan: ” Also, we gave the graphics department Adderall this afternoon.”
FeltLuke
Carmella should sit ringside beating the hell out of that ref with the briefcase until someone pulls her away.
Blade_222
There’s a WWE Hall of Famer cutting a promo on every other station right now.
troi
they killed Manu Ginobli!
Big Baby Yeezus
Damn..Who put Rhyno in the dryer?
Endy_Mion
I guess with Samir hurt Sunil will be Singh-ing solo tonight at ringside.
The Real Birdman
Let’s get AOP here and we can do Usos v Usos on Bane venom
(Including Top Comments From The Mixed Match Challenge)
nushney
Next to Get these Hands:
-Jimmy Uso
-whoever they face in the SemiFinals
-whoever they face in the Finals
-Buddy Murphy
LUNI_TUNZ
“Alexa, would you like to make me the happiest man in the world… and get these hands… in marriage?”
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. As always, drop us a comment below, and share the column on social media to help us stay in the business of dick jokes and Braun Strowman GIFs. Be here next week for Rusev vs. BAHBROOD, and probably more bickering!
Have you checked out this week’s podcast with Eric Bischoff?
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