Until confirmed (and even then, things can still change), every rumor has to be taken with a grain of salt. When Andrew Zarian tossed out dates for the 2021 WWE Draft as being set for August 30th and September 3rd, it seemed as good as any time to take care of shaking up the rosters.
Now, Zarian is reporting WWE has delayed the draft several weeks down the line. He suggests October 1st/4th or 4th/8th as the next likely dates this may go down.
At the moment, WWE has yet to even hint at a draft happening at all, let alone any given time frame for it to take place.
What does this mean? Why would WWE push it back? How might this affect each of the rosters, as well as plans for current and upcoming feuds seemingly in the works?
Let’s try to sort out what could have caused this change and how things may play out differently now that the draft isn’t happening for an extra month.
Breathing Room for SummerSlam and Extreme Rules (and TakeOver?)
One reason why might be because WWE doesn’t want to crowd the landscape with too much going on at the same time. Spreading things out allows the writers more of an opportunity to focus on one thing at a time.
SummerSlam is set for August 21, meaning this initial idea would place the draft the very next week. You’d get one episode of Raw for fallout from SummerSlam while promoting the next episode as “everything can change.”
Rumors have circulated that an NXT TakeOver event could accompany SummerSlam Weekend, too, taking place Sunday the 22nd. While that doesn’t take focus away from the people responsible for the main roster, the draft does factor in NXT for call-ups. That might make things a little more confusing. It certainly doesn’t make it any easier, that’s for sure.
There’s also Extreme Rules. As evidenced by how ungodly many rematches take place on WWE programming these days, the company clearly has a directive to “just do that again” as often as possible, no matter how much that might hurt ratings and interest.
Perhaps WWE started working on plans for the SummerSlam card, saw Extreme Rules coming up on September 26th and said “Damn it. That’s going to be hard to do the big event, a draft, and then have enough time to sort out Extreme Rules, too. How about we just do a series of rematches for the B-level event and in the meantime, that’ll give us time to sort out the draft after that?”
Any scenario that involves less work/effort and more rematches is something I can imagine is approved these days in WWE, so that wouldn’t surprise me.
Season Premiere = Draft Day
Zarian also stated that the October 4th episode of Monday Night Raw would be designated its “season premiere.” This is always strange for a show that doesn’t have any actual seasons, but they do classify a premiere every year in some fashion.
A solid theory would be that WWE wants to kick off its premiere for Raw (and possibly SmackDown, if they end up saying the 8th is the blue brand’s premiere) with something they know will draw viewers without having to book title matches and guest appearances.
Think about it. What’s easier to do:
a) Orchestrate a series of feuds and storylines that have proper star power and can get people invested, and simply throw them away for one night when you can draft them out for a month or more by only doing one piece of it at a time on each episode.
b) Scrounge up whatever legends you can get to appear, knowing you have less now than ever before and it didn’t pop a huge rating the last time.
c) Call it the draft and tell people everything is changing and this premiere is going to truly kick off a different feel for the two shows going forward. Basically, all you’re doing is announcing a list of people and putting some matches on for filler, but you’re being given the benefit of the doubt that this is a “fresh start” and you have good will from the fans and a big premiere to show off to USA without needing to bring in guest stars.
I know I’d bank more on Option C being the easiest, simplest, catch-all answer.
Recent Call-Ups on the SmackDown Roster
Delaying this a month now makes more sense why WWE called Tegan Nox, Shotzi Blackheart and Toni Storm up to SmackDown already. It felt strange they’d make the jump just a few weeks prior to a draft that they could have been part of. But there’s a big difference between 8 weeks and 13 weeks.
SmackDown needed the women NOW. Actually, it needed the women OVER A YEAR AGO. Let’s not forget that for the bulk of Bayley’s reign as champion, she fought only Nikki Cross and Alexa Bliss. We’re talking months of having no options because they bled SmackDown dry—something that happens every single year, without fail, and they never learn from. Insanity.
Bianca Belair was set to fight Bayley again at Money in the Bank. Clearly, WWE was stalling. They didn’t want Sasha Banks to make her return for this event, rather than SummerSlam, and when Bayley went down with her injury, they were forced to take a look at how thin the roster was and panicked.
Assuming Banks fights Belair at SummerSlam and they do a third match with some sort of gimmick attached to it at Extreme Rules, that carries them week after week. It won’t automatically be great (especially after seeing how awful that feud was prior to WrestleMania and how they banked on it just being “But isn’t it great these two awesome performers are in the main event? Ignore the bad story.”). But what it will be is “something easy to do for 2 months straight.” Easy = go for it, as far as WWE’s concerned these days.
Nox, Shotzi and Storm will be the new kids on the block that distract from that. As they get their footing on SmackDown, that will kill some time and WWE will become more comfortable with them before deciding who they want to shift around between Monday and Friday night, as they may not even stay there.
What’s Up with Mandy Rose on the NXT Roster?
Tonight on NXT, Mandy Rose randomly popped up. There was no rhyme or reason to her appearance and she didn’t focus on any one person in particular. At first, she was simply watching on as Sarray and Gigi Dolin wrestled. Then, she had some words with Franky Monet, Robert Stone and Jessi Kamea.
What’s she doing there? “You’ll see.”
She’s back in NXT, in some fashion, for some indeterminate amount of time. Seemingly, without Dana Brooke.
Now, you may be asking yourself “But isn’t she feuding with Natalya and Tamina? Didn’t Rose and Brooke just keep that angle going the day before on Raw?”
Yup. They are, and they did. But WWE doesn’t care about continuity. You can’t think logically about some of these things. Shotzi Blackheart and Ember Moon were the tag team in NXT, and Tegan Nox returned to screw Candice LeRae and Indi Hartwell. The next time we see them, Shotzi and Nox are a team, the Candice story is dropped and Moon is simply losing to Dakota Kai for the sake of probably taking up a few minutes. Toni Storm was trying to set up a match with Sarray and instead, the latter is fighting Gigi Dolin.
WWE spent weeks setting up this Women’s Tag Team Championship match only to not pull the trigger. Very easily, the match could have taken place at WrestleMania Backlash or Money in the Bank, or any episode of Raw in the meantime. For whatever reason, WWE decided to keep pushing it back. Now, there’s a good chance it just won’t happen and it’s just dead.
My suspicion is that Triple H sat down with the team and said “You took three of my girls away. I’d like to get someone in return.” Then, they said “How about Mandy Rose? We don’t think we’ll do anything super important with her and she’s a big enough name that she might improve the ratings.”
Maybe Mandy doesn’t want to travel right now and is opting to stay in Florida, for all we know and that’s the impetus for this change. My theory is that it was either planned to take place in a few weeks at the draft and they’re just shifting it up on the calendar, or there is NO plan and they’re just doing random things for the sake of it while one hand isn’t talking to the other.
What does this mean for Dana Brooke? She’s likely going back into a jobber role, sadly.
Aliyah Splits from The Robert Stone Brand
It’s a little suspicious that we’ve seen another tag team split in NXT this week, too, with Aliyah turning on Robert Stone.
Not only did she lash out on him, but she flat out quit and seemingly turned babyface in the process. Then, Franky Monet joined up, as has been teased a few times.
Aliyah’s been in NXT longer than I think anyone else on the roster. Between the tryouts and the assessments that have been happening at the Performance Center, maybe something clicked and they’re finally willing to take a chance on her on the main roster.
And/or, maybe they just decided enough time’s gone by. At a certain point, you have to shit or get off the toilet. It’s time to sink or swim. If she’s not ready by now, she might never be ready, so let’s try her out on Raw or SmackDown and see what happens. At the very least, she’ll be someone fresh for people who don’t watch NXT, which is a bonus.
I’m anticipating she was going to move up during the draft and the plan to split her from The Robert Stone Brand had been in the works. Then, after moving things back a month, they figured it shouldn’t delay the NXT plans and they’ll just deal with it.
Essentially, this is probably her last run with the black and gold brand. She probably was set up to wrestle a few more times and jump to Raw or SmackDown at the end of August and beginning of September. Now, she’ll do exactly the same thing, but sit out the rest of September until the draft happens in October—or, they’ll simply drag out this story an extra couple weeks and only touch on it every other week, instead of every week.
Time to Plan…Maybe? Probably Not
Maybe…just maybe…WWE realized they continually botch the draft every year and Bayley’s injury got them thinking “Shit! We never plan anything in advance! Now, we’re caught with our pants around our ankles and we have no backup plans! How can we stop this from happening?”
If we’re so lucky that this finally got through, they could have realized they need more time to properly plan out the draft and plans for the next year. Then, feeling the pressure of August 30th being too soon, they decided to push it away for a few more weeks to give themselves time to have a few more meetings. In fact, that may be in part because they want to know what happens with…
Live Crowd’s Reaction for Superstars
Vince McMahon has always lived inside a bubble. Everyone speaks about how he works so much that he doesn’t connect with pop culture in the same way as everyone else. His perception of the world and his company is entirely from the inside.
This past year, WWE itself has lived inside a bubble. The ThunderDome is quite literally an enclosure that has allowed WWE to dictate the cheers and boos from without knowing at all how the actual audience would react.
Checking Twitter responses and message boards (which WWE might not even do) is not an accurate enough assessment of what the live audience will do with each individual Superstar. Riddle might seem like the biggest villain in the world on Twitter with a vocal minority tweeting about how he should be fired, only to get massively cheered at WrestleMania.
WWE could think it’s too quick to go from this upcoming Friday Night SmackDown to August 30th and get a proper gauge of how each wrestler is perceived right now in preparation for the draft. Maybe they want a few more weeks to really showcase all the talent so by October, there’s a better idea of who is over, who the heels and babyfaces are, and how each roster would be best served being balanced out.
Of course, there’s a chance this is all b.s. Maybe Zarian’s information was wrong before, or it’s wrong now, or both. There’s no way of knowing for sure, nor will we ever probably find out the specifics of how things are playing out backstage. But for now, it’s fun to speculate on the potential chaos going on right now and the mess that’s about to unfold.
What do you think is going on with the 2021 WWE Draft? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!
