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WWE News: Roman Reigns at SummerSlam, Vince McMahon Changing Smackdown, SummerSlam Matches Moved

TJR Wrestling

There is a lot of news after this week’s WWE Raw and Smackdown episodes thanks to WWE’s Chairman and CEO Vince McMahon changing plans as he loves to do.

On Tuesday, there were reports about two hours before the show that Vince ripped up most of the script and changed nearly everything that was on there. Why? Because he’s 73 years old and loves to change his mind a lot. It must be an incredibly frustrating situation for members of the creative team that work on the show several days in advance and then when Monday or Tuesday comes, the plans change.

Thanks to Wrestling Observer Radio, here’s some more info on changes from the week and plans going forward.

– It was reported by Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer that Smackdown was going to feature Kofi Kingston vs. Daniel Bryan. Meanwhile, PWInsider’s Mike Johnson claimed that at one point going into Smackdown, Kofi would face Andrade. Kofi wasn’t even on Smackdown aside from a video package and Andrade wasn’t on Smackdown either. The main event was Bryan and Rowan vs. Big E and Xavier Woods with a DQ finish in a great match that went nearly 20 minutes.

– Whatever WWE had planned for Daniel Bryan’s “career-altering announcement,” that angle has been dropped.

– The reason Sami Zayn vs. Aleister Black was done on Smackdown instead of SummerSlam is because when Vince McMahon re-wrote Smackdown, they had plenty of time to fill, so he decided to do that match on Smackdown. What kind of long term planning is that? It’s bad long term planning.

– There was a Women’s Tag Team Titles match on Raw where Alexa Bliss and Nikki Cross won the titles in a Fatal 4-Way match. Originally, that match was going to happen at SummerSlam, but it got moved to Raw because they were given nearly 20 minutes on Raw and if it was at SummerSlam, it would have been shorter. That makes sense, but it also shortens the SummerSlam lineup.

– The current WWE SummerSlam lineup has ten matches, which we covered here. A new match that is expected to be added is Drew McIntyre vs. Cedric Alexander based on their issues on Raw over the last month. It’s always possible that WWE could add more matches.

– It is possible that Roman Reigns won’t have a match at SummerSlam even though he’s healthy and he’s on the SummerSlam poster. There was a rumor of Reigns and Samoa Joe vs. Daniel Bryan and Rowan, but it doesn’t look like it will make the SummerSlam card. Reigns vs. Bryan is expected to happen at several live events after SummerSlam, so that’s clearly the direction they are going.

– According to WrestleVotes on Twitter, there has been some discussions in doing Reigns vs. Buddy Murphy at SummerSlam.

On Smackdown, Murphy told Reigns (after Reigns beat him up) that Rowan had something to do with the forklift accident on Smackdown last week. If they have a match, it would make sense although it will probably be short and Reigns will probably get the easy win.

There might be more that comes out in the coming days, but that’s some of the news from the past couple of days.

TJR Thoughts: It’s tough for me to sit here and complain about scripts changing because we have no way to know exactly what was on the whole show. I thought Smackdown was okay this week while last week, which was also changed heavily, was a great show. I know some fans want to complain about this stuff all the time, but if we have no way of knowing what was happening before, what’s there to complain about? I feel bad for the creative team members that spend their time trying to come up with these shows only for Vince to change his mind.