3 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Saturday Night's Main Event (Results & Review)

2. World Title Rematch Upgrade

WWE Saturday Night's Main Event Cody Rhodes Drew McIntyre
WWE

Drew McIntyre and Cody Rhodes ran back their WWE Championship match from Wrestlepalooza on Saturday night, but they thankfully upped their game with this show-opening effort.

September’s match could easily be termed a disappointment given the pedigrees of the two wrestlers involved. And while their bout at Saturday Night’s Main Event was far from a classic, they leaned into the “title can change hands on count-out or disqualification” stipulation nicely without overdoing it. McIntyre tried to goad Cody to take a cheap shot and get DQ’d while taking shortcuts himself, and he begged for a count-out win after knocking Rhodes off the apron and through the announce desk.

As is customary in big McIntyre matches, there were some hijinks that will give him plenty of ammunition to claim there is a conspiracy against him, with the referee getting bumped and Cody nailing a DDT on the title before putting Drew away with a Cross-Rhodes.

The match also benefited from its placement on the card as the opener on free TV, as opposed to closing WWE’s first PLE on ESPN (Wrestlepalooza). That alone gifted them some leeway to not have to put on an epic title match.

The question coming out of Saturday is whether they will try to run this back again with a stipped-up rematch.

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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.