December 2, 2019 Observer Newsletter: Survivor Series weekend, Mauro Ranallo/Corey Graves

WWE’s four days in Chicago’s Allstate Arena were headlined by the Survivor Series, which drew the largest, but hardly the loudest crowd of the weekend.

A legitimate sellout of 11,500 fans on 11/24 indicated a few things.

First, the lowest rated brand by far drew the loudest reactions. The matches pushed the hardest on television got mixed reactions. Nobody seemed to care much for Raw and Smackdown, and were heavily into NXT.

And based on the fact they did a scoreboard on the seven interbrand matches, which ended with NXT winning four, Smackdown two and Raw one, you could very clearly see the priority right now is trying to market the NXT brand as not being viewed as developmental or lesser, and most importantly, use the show to increase Wednesday night ratings. From a strategic standpoint, they couldn’t have done better. Time will tell if the strategy works long-term but writing this without knowledge of how numbers will turn out, thus far the angles that built the show plus the appearances of main roster talent have turned around the NXT ratings. The idea is, at least for now, that you will no longer see the Raw and Smackdown talent on NXT as much, so getting the brand over is the key long-term. It should help and the race should tighten up. I would suspect NXT viewership to increase even without Raw & Smackdown talent, at least to well above the pre-SS build-up levels. The key was the push in making people like Shayna Baszler, Rhea Ripley, Keith Lee, Roderick Strong and Matt Riddle into stars based on booking here, combined with the fact that of the three singles title matches, the NXT title bout with Adam Cole beating Pete Dunne was clearly the best of the three.

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