The 2019 edition of WWE Draft is over as seen on these past episodes of Monday Night Raw and Friday Night SmackDown. The roster is now split into two halves exclusive to the separate brands with the Wild Card Rule getting demolished. However, the Crown Jewel PPV event will feature several matches comprising Raw and SmackDown superstars where intercrossing between brands will be allowed.
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Meanwhile, the 2019 Draft has been a major success on WWE’s part when it comes to garnering attention. They presented the entire thing in a whole lot of mainstream way possible which is similar to the Football draft. Also, the company invited several celebrity guests on the shows to be a part for one sole reason which is to increase the viewership.
#WWENow has your FULL recap of Night 2 of the #WWEDraft, presented by @Xfinity! pic.twitter.com/q3cvF4fEUq
— WWE (@WWE) October 16, 2019
The FOX premiere episode of SmackDown witnessed the TV ratings going for a huge jump and thereby brought a big reason to tune in to WWE programming. The officials wanted the viewers to stick around via this Draft. Dave Meltzer explained on Wrestling Observer Radio that WWE decided on a Draft to improve the ratings. Now that the switching process is over, we can see the rosters didn’t get changed around all too much. Also, there was not much surprise in-store, at all, (courtesy ringsidenews.com)
“The rosters they were originally going to go with — because there weren’t a lot of changes — the rosters that they were originally going to go with on Raw and SmackDown, those were the rosters after WrestleMania. They weren’t going to do another Draft, then I guess they felt for whatever reason that they needed this secondary draft thing for ratings for the second week of SmackDown.”
Meltzer added that the sole reason to host the Draft was to increase the second SmackDown episode on FOX. But the bad news is that last week’s SmackDown number was down over 1 million viewers with an additional 12 million possible viewers since Dish and Sling fixed their issues with FOX. Whereas the first episode earned 3.9 million viewers, the second one had approximate 2.8 million. It was below the expectations as FOX wanted weekly 3million viewers, on average. Hopefully, WWE has more backup plans in-store to counter the viewership problems.
