WWE Smackdown Live Ratings Surged Thanks To The Big Title Change

There’s a new WWE Champion and his name is AJ Styles. It feels good writing that because the WWE Championship that Styles held earlier this year is back around his waist after he defeated Jinder Mahal during this week’s edition of Smackdown that was taped on Tuesday in Manchester, England.

The title change made a lot of WWE fans happy because Mahal’s run as champion wasn’t very exciting at all. Mahal cut repetitive promos week after week, had below average matches and most of the matches had the same formula with the Singh Brothers interfering to help him beat the likes of Randy Orton and Shinsuke Nakamura multiple times. After nearly six months of Mahal as WWE Champion, it was time for a change.

This week’s Smackdown drew a good number in the ratings with 2.603 million viewers for the two-hour show, according to Showbuzz Daily.

It’s a good number that is slightly above the average for the fall season. That’s a 23% increase from last week‘s very disappointing 2.12 million viewers, which was Smackdown’s second lowest audience of the year. Last week’s show had strong competition going against the MLB World Series Game 6 and it was also Halloween night. While this week’s number is good, it is below what they did two weeks ago with 2.699 million viewers.

It is no surprise that the ratings up when fans knew that a WWE Championship match was coming. What’s interesting is that WWE only announced Mahal vs. Styles on Thursday morning, which was a day later than when the disappointing 2.12 million viewers number came out for last week’s show. While Vince McMahon isn’t going to tell us that they did the title change was a result of that poor rating, it’s certainly a possibility.

Styles was originally supposed to face Rusev this week and that was changed, so something happened that led to WWE choosing to put the WWE Title back on Styles. Was it the ratings from last week’s show? It sure seems like a strong possibility.

Next week’s Smackdown will feature two title matches as Natalya defends the Smackdown Women’s Championship against Charlotte Flair and Baron Corbin defends the United States Championship against Kalisto. No word on if Styles may defend the WWE Championship against Jinder Mahal, but it’s a possibility since WWE is putting a lot of title matches on television of late.