12 Ups And 15 Downs For WWE In 2016

2. Women’s Wrestling

becky lynch sasha charlotte.jpg
WWE.com

As much of a hot Dumpster fire that the “Divas Revolution” became in 2015, the women’s evolution that WWE boasted about in 2016 came to full fruition.

Regardless of how you feel about Charlotte Flair and Sasha Banks trading the title back and forth five times in the last few months of the year, the two women, along with Bayley and Nia Jax on Raw and Becky Lynch, Alexa Bliss and Nikki Bella on SmackDown, helped elevate women’s wrestling by producing solid matches, good storylines and re-educating fans to appreciate female wrestlers as athletes first rather than as objects to ogle.

Charlotte and Sasha main-evented Raw twice and closed down the Hell in a Cell PPV, showing just how far women’s wrestling had come. Sure, there are critics about the feud and some of the matches themselves, but five years ago, WWE wouldn’t even have been in the position of considering putting a women’s match on last on Raw or to close a PPV. In 2016, it happened.

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Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.