8 Ups & 9 Downs For WWE NXT In 2020
Counter-programming chaos defines NXT's 2020, but it wasn't ALL bad on the black-and-gold brand...
The image above these words contains not a shred of black and gold, save, pedantically, for splashes on Bayley's gear and the glimpse of Io Shirai's NXT Women's Title. And yet, objectively speaking it was perhaps the most successful match of the year for the brand synonymous with the colour scheme.
NXT started a war in 2019 that they've comfortably lost in 2020, but the match between Shirai and Sasha Banks obscured the reality for one night at least. A whopping 900,000 tuned into it over the 645,000 watching AEW Dynamite's main event, in a quarter hour that carried the whole broadcast over the line to win the viewership battle for the evening. The demographics were long lost by then, of course, but WWE's third brand has gotten used to taking second place a lot lately.
Indeed, Banks/Shirai's battle was simultaneously everything dead right and bang wrong with the way NXT books - or at least booked, for the majority of 2020. A banger match because the workers are amazing, as result of a grabby pitch because the process is flawed.
More on all of this later, anyway. There felt no purer distillation of the ups and downs of NXT's year than this contest, but there were certainly plenty more worthy of similar attention...