2 Ups And 4 Downs From WWE Mae Young Classic (Sept 12)

In-ring product drops off dramatically, but we get a notable TV debut...

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It didn’t take long for the Mae Young Classic to give us a disappointing goose egg of an episode. After a promising debut last week, the all-woman tournament offered up four matches Wednesday that underperformed and left fans without a memorable bout to take with them.

The classic gave us the television debut of former American Ninja Warrior star Kacy Catanzaro in one of the few bright spots of the program. It also gave us a main event that could have dazzled, but instead, it fizzled. Overall, it was pretty telling that the episode ended with 10 minutes left in the hour, meaning that between the packages, recaps and matches, they couldn’t fill 60 minutes. That’s just disappointing.

Looking ahead at the participants who haven’t had a match yet, there’s reason to believe that this episode was an aberration, that the next two first-round episodes should produce some decent wrestling to keep fans’ attention. With Io Shirari, Kaitlyn, Toni Storm, Mia Yim, Rachel Evers and Xia Brookside still to wrestle, there should be brighter days ahead.

With that said, let’s take a look at how this second episode of the tournament fared. What actually clicked, and what fell well short? Let’s get to it…

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Contributor
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.