I’m more locked in on whether Lil Yachty makes it five minutes with Baron Corbin than I am on Cody Rhodes and Randy Orton headlining a WWE special, and if that sentence bothers you, you don’t understand where wrestling is right now.
This Sunday’s Sunday Night’s Main Event card, live on Peacock out of Atlanta, has Cody Rhodes and Randy Orton on top, which reads like a real main event because it is one. But Fightful reports the actual hook of the card is U.S. Champion Baron Corbin defending his title against Lil Yachty in a five-minute survival challenge, which also happens to be Yachty’s official in-ring WWE debut. Trick Williams gets his own U.S. Title shot at Corbin if Yachty makes it the full five minutes. Somebody in a production meeting decided the U.S. Championship picture needed a rapper in it worse than it needed wrestlers actually fighting over it.
They’re probably right.
Quavo is opening the show with an unreleased track off his new album, in his hometown, on the same card as the Baron Corbin title defense. Backstage word is TKO views the performance as a test case for folding concerts into future major shows, not a one-off. That’s a company deciding music might sell a wrestling card harder than wrestling does.
The rest of Sunday’s card is stacked enough on its own, including Oba Femi against Bron Breakker and a six-woman tag stuffed with future main-eventers. Any other week, that lineup is the headline. This week it’s competing with a rapper’s five-minute clock and a hometown concert for the same oxygen, and Rhodes and Orton deserved a night where they were the story instead.
WWE’s own leadership seems entirely aware of what it built. Triple H posted about the Yachty match like it’s a life-or-death gauntlet, not a novelty booking:
https://twitter.com/TripleH/status/2090975839072522668
That’s the company’s Chief Content Officer selling a five-minute survival stipulation with more urgency than most of the roster gets for an actual title defense. WWE has fully accepted that the celebrity stunt is the marketing engine now, and the title picture is just where they park it, which is basically what happened to the SummerSlam card WWE didn’t plan too, and it worked there.
My sister is going to read this and tell me I’ve lost the plot for caring more about a rapper’s stipulation than a Hall of Fame main event. She’s allowed to say that. I’m still going to have the five-minute clock pulled up in one tab and Rhodes-Orton in the other Sunday night, and I already know which one I’m checking first.
Check out the rest of our WWE coverage before Sunday, because nobody in that production meeting is agreeing on which match is actually the main event.
