3 Ups And 3 Downs From Last Night's WWE SmackDown (Jan 17)

This week's Smackdown was built around a special main event - for the first time in history, the blue brand would feature a cage match pitting two women against each other. Not only that, but the Smackdown Women's Championship would be on the line when Becky Lynch battled Alexa Bliss.

While that match ultimately ended up delivering, it was only one bout on a full card, and the rest of the show was pretty underwhelming. After closing out 2016 with a great episode, Smackdown has been slowly getting worse each week, and now it's at the point where Tuesday's episode wasn't really compelling in any way.

That's particularly troubling when the show featured two singles matches that haven't been beaten into the ground yet - The Miz versus AJ Styles and Dean Ambrose versus Randy Orton. Both bouts were lackluster (though Ambrose-Orton was still decent) and served as set-ups for brawls that were ultimately deemed more important than the contests. Combined with some truly bad angles, this Smackdown was not worth going out of your way to see.

Here are 3 ups and 3 downs from January 17's Smackdown: