10 Anti-AEW Moves WWE Made Out Of Spite

1. The SmackDown Replay

One week after Supersized SmackDown, WWE thrust two blue brand replays immediately after the show's 22 October episode. The first, airing at 10 PM ET, was to go head-to-head with a preempted Dynamite episode. Again, it appeared that WWE was attempting to flex on the rival promotion by attempting to beat it with a replay.

You can probably guess what happened next.

Rampage's 288,000 P18-49 viewers made for a 0.22 rating. The head-to-head SmackDown, meanwhile, notched 0.16 with 212,000 viewers in this demographic, which is the metric used by the television industry to rank shows. Thus, Dynamite finished 24th on the night amongst cable and broadcast shows, while the SmackDown rerun sat at 35th.

This was no great surprise. An original AEW should outdo a show most WWE fans will already have watched two hours prior. Still, the market leaders were so gotten-to that they felt they need to counterprogram a company they are exponentially bigger than on two consecutive weeks, then lost both head-to-head slots.