10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About The Bloodline
7. Ratings Battle With Ruby Soho & The Bunny
A daft one in theory, there's probably more within WWE that remember this than care to admit, based on how wilfully petty the group are whenever there's a chance to score a ratings victory at All Elite Wrestling's expense.
2024's NBA finals going against Dynamite encouraged WWE to load up that week's NXT with Cody Rhodes of all people, so to suggest the scars of the Wednesday Night Wars have healed would be naïve in the extreme. Those within the market leader probably weren't best pleased when a stunt-casting of Roman Reigns on an October 2021 edition of SmackDown that went head-to-head with that week's Rampage.
As reported by Dave Meltzer at the time, "Ruby Soho vs. Bunny tied Roman & [Brock] Lesnar, both at 0.23", and ex-Wrestlenomics now-AEW numbers guru Chris Harrington added; "It's convoluted math and we won't know until tomorrow when the min x min come out, but since AEW had 6 minutes of commercials in Q2 and SmackDown had zero, it could have even been as high as .25 to .20 during the actual head-to-head tv minutes. We will see!"
And they did, and it did! The Bunny and Ruby Soho can claim a big one over Roman specifically, who at this point was being preserved as a draw by virtue of his increasingly reduced schedule.