The Elimination Chamber go-home edition of WWE RAW will take place tonight from the Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Tonight’s RAW will air on Syfy for the second straight week due to Winter Olympics coverage on the USA Network. The show will return to USA next week.
Tonight’s WWE SmackDown on FOX will air live from the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans, Louisiana.
It appears Shane McMahon is still actively involved in WWE operations in some capacity.
Earlier this week, Marco Masotti, the owner of South Africa’s Sharks rugby team, revealed via Twitter that he met with McMahon to discuss a partnership with WWE.
As seen below, Masotti tweeted a picture of himself with McMahon and Doug Cifu, the co-owner of NHL franchise Florida Panthers. He wrote:
So grateful for a night out with brothers Shane McMahon (son of WWE Vince) and Doug Cifu (co-owner of Florida Panthers). Excited for a partnership between WWE and rugby.
Masotti’s tweet was sent on Tuesday, which would indicate that he met with McMahon the previous night.
As widely reported, Shane McMahon received significant backstage heat for his involvement as a producer, writer and entrant in last month’s 30-Man Royal Rumble Match. A recent report mentioned how Shane made a pitch to enter the battle royal at #1, until Vince McMahon stepped in and scrapped a lot of his plans. Earlier reports also noted that McMahon had been pulled from all RAW, Elimination Chamber, and WrestleMania 38 plans.
Source: Wrestling Inc.
Tonight’s WWE NXT 2.0 episode will be the go-home show for next week’s Vengeance Day special.
NXT will air on Syfy for the next two weeks starting with tonight’s show. It’s believed that there will be limited commercial interruptions with more picture-in-picture commercial breaks.
In case you haven’t heard, wrestling has a forbidden door and apparently, it’s wide open. AEW wrestlers are competing in New Japan, Impact stars are showing up in WWE, and pretty much everyone is appearing for GCW. The most shocking of all was that middle one. Mickie James returning to WWE for one night only even though she is currently the Impact Knockouts World Champion.
James made an appearance in the women’s Royal Rumble and even though she isn’t a WWE Superstar, she had quite a good showing. She was even allowed to wear her Knockouts Title to the ring. However, eagle-eyed fans might have noticed the bottom third referred to the championship as the Impact Women’s Title. Not what it’s called, and this was no accident.
During a recent episode of Fightful’s Grapsody, which you can check out below, Will Washington reveals a few of the words WWE’s announcers were not allowed to say when discussing James during the Rumble. The big one was the ability to say Impact, but not Impact Wrestling. Not a slight on the rival wrestling company, but rather the hang-up Vince McMahon has with the word wrestling. It’s sports entertainment.
The title being given an entirely different name is also linked to words WWE didn’t want said on the air. Knockouts was one, and world was another. Unclear what WWE’s problem is with the word knockouts. Perhaps it doesn’t want fans to think wrestlers might get legitimately knocked out. As for the word world, maybe since its own Women’s Titles don’t have the word world in them, McMahon feared fans would think the Knockouts Title would be thought of as better than by more casual fans.
The ban on those words for Royal Rumble also extended to the social media team. As for the announcers, dodging words and phrases McMahon doesn’t like being said on his TV shows is an almost untraversable minefield at this point. The longer the list gets, the more respect we should all have for Michael Cole. The man gets a lot of stick from fans, but to be doing that job as long as he has with McMahon constantly in his ear, he deserves more credit than he gets.
Source: TheSportster
Tonight’s WWE RAW will air live from the Ball Arena in Denver, Colorado with more build for Elimination Chamber and WrestleMania 38.
RAW will air on Syfy tonight due to USA Network’s coverage of the Winter Olympics. The show will reportedly air with limited commercial interruptions.
On his podcast, Hall of Famer Kurt Angle revealed that WWE canceled plans for his return to the company.
WWE Hall of Famer Kurt Angle revealed on his podcast that there were indeed plans for him to return to television.
Before last week’s Royal Rumble pay-per-view, it was reported that Angle would be traveling to St. Louis, Missouri — the host city of the event. Royal Rumble was held inside The Dome at America’s Center. This naturally led to speculation that Angle would be a surprise entry in the 30-man Royal Rumble match. That never wound up taking place, however.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Kurt Angle Show (h/t WrestlingNews.co), the Olympic gold medalist explained that he went to the Royal Rumble as the company wanted him “to do a short program that they ended up canceling it at the last second.” Angle added they “had a great time”, as they got to visit Kim Orton, who’s close friends with his wife, Giovanna.
Angle added that he did some interviews for documentaries and took photos with fans. The former WWE Champion stated that his canceled program was scheduled to last three weeks, emphasizing that he isn’t signed to WWE right now.
The men’s Royal Rumble match greatly lacked in surprise entries. Shane McMahon was an unannounced “surprise” return, though many reports stated ahead of time that he would be back. Drew McIntyre had been out of action for almost a month with a neck injury before showing up unexpectedly as the No. 21 entry.
Source: TheSportster
As we’ve noted, WWE brought Shane back for the 30-Man Royal Rumble Match on Saturday. He worked the match as a competitor, but was also the lead producer and writer for the match. This led to major locker room heat for McMahon over the way he took charge of the booking and allegedly tried to make the match about himself.
In an update, Ringside News reports that Shane has been “quietly let go” by WWE. It was noted that WWE creative writers were told in a “semi-quiet way” that “there will be no more creative discussions about Shane McMahon” and that they have now “moved on to other creative discussions.”
There was reports about how Shane was scheduled to wrestle at WWE Elimination Chamber and WrestleMania 38, but now those plans have been 100% scrapped, according to the report. It was also reported earlier this week that plans called for Shane to work the RAW brand as a heel, but those plans have also been nixed.
The report also stated that WWE Chairman & CEO Vince McMahon had no choice but to take action against his own son due to the heat from The Rumble. Shane has not been a WWE employee for some time, and was “supposed to be involved in the XFL but then COVID-19 hit” and the league went into bankruptcy. WWE then brought Shane back for another run that began at The Rumble, but the run has already ended.
“Vince had no choice. Shane created chaos, had everyone in an uproar, pissed off everyone in the Rumble, openly buried other producers, and was changing things that Vince wanted. Vince had no other choice but to send him home,” a WWE source said.
The report also noted that Vince is “quietly” using the term “let go” to describe the situation with Shane. While the term “blackballed” has not been used, word from within WWE is that Shane was “pretty much ‘let go.’”
McMahon entered the 30-Man Royal Rumble Match at #28 and was the 28th elimination, tossed out by Lesnar after 5 minutes and 38 seconds in. He picked up just one elimination and that was Kevin Owens. There is no confirmation on what WWE had planned for Shane at Elimination Chamber and WrestleMania 38.
Source: Wrestling Inc,
Tonight’s WWE NXT 2.0 episode will air live from the WWE Performance Center with more build for the upcoming Vengeance Day event.
According to a report, WWE morale was low backstage after the Royal Rumble largely because a plethora of changes were made before the event.
The backstage “morale” following Saturday’s WWE Royal Rumble pay-per-view was reportedly low.
Before the Royal Rumble pay-per-view commenced, it was reported that Vince McMahon had made several changes to the Royal Rumble matches. As previously noted, Riddle was reportedly initially scheduled to win the men’s Royal Rumble match, but WWE ultimately went with Brock Lesnar.
According to a report from Mike Johnson of PWInsider, “the morale with the WWE locker room among talents was down” after the show. This was largely “due to the whirlwind of changes made to the Rumble matches in the days and hours” before the Royal Rumble event started.
It was noted by Johnson that Triple H (Paul Levesque) and producer Tyson Kidd (T.J. Wilson) usually play major roles at the Royal Rumble event. Specifically, Triple H would be used “in an advisory role of sorts”, which includes making adjustments “to accentuate certain talents”. Triple H remains sidelined as he continues to recover from a serious cardiac event back in September that required surgery.
Johnson added that Kidd often plays “a massive leading role in producing the women’s division”, but he wasn’t present for Saturday’s event in St. Louis, Missouri.
Kofi Kingston botched a spot and was eliminated from the men’s Royal Rumble match sooner than planned. It was also reported that Shane McMahon, who returned to WWE programming following a lengthy hiatus, has plenty of backstage heat for largely booking the Royal Rumble around himself.
There was plenty of hype around Saturday’s Royal Rumble pay-per-view, but in many ways, it did not live up to expectations. For one, why couldn’t Roman Reigns and Bobby Lashley just win their respective matches cleanly? Why did Lesnar himself have to win the Royal Rumble when he’s already an established main event star? WWE missed several opportunities to piece together a top quality Royal Rumble event here, and it’s no wonder that so many fans were left greatly disappointed.
Source: TheSportster
