The current WWE Champion Brock Lesnar is set to defend his WWE Championship against Drew McIntyre this weekend at WrestleMania 36. At 6 AM EST on day two of WrestleMania 36, ESPN 2 will be airing a five-hour Brock Lesnar marathon and the news was confirmed during an interview with Sports Illustrated by Brent Colborne, who’s ESPN’s Senior Director of Programming.
The Lesnar slate will include four of his most memorable UFC bouts along with his championship victory in the 2000 NCAA Wrestling Championship tournament. Lesnar’s fights with Alistair Overeem, his UFC Heavyweight Championship title defense from 2010 against Shane Carwin, his 2010 title defense against Cain Velasquez and his victory over Randy Couture are the fights that’ll be airing during the program.
Over the past two weeks, ESPN has aired WrestleMania 30 and WrestleMania 32 and they’ll be airing WrestleMania 35 this weekend as well. Brent Colborne said ESPN is enjoying being creative with the WWE content they’re being presented with and in the case of Brock Lesnar, it helps that they have the rights to the footage of his NCAA Championship victory along with their partnership with UFC.
“We’re having fun and being creative. This past Sunday we did an entire day of wrestling leading into WrestleMania 32 with the 2013 NCAA Wrestling Championship and some of our best 30-for-30s, including Nature Boy. We wanted to do the same thing for this upcoming Sunday. Brock Lesnar is obviously is a huge star in WWE, and within in our own existing rights with UFC and the NCAA Championships, we have the ability to do something really fun and showcase Brock as an athlete.”
Colborne was asked about the possibility of a WrestleMania airing live on ESPN and he said they are always open to the discussion of it. But for right now, ESPN is focused on the short-term negotiations that they have with the sports-entertainment company.
“It’s a great question. We’re always open to discussing a lot of different ideas with various leagues, but right now the focus for what we’re doing with WWE is on the short-term. We felt like this was a really good content opportunity for us to show these three encores, and a really good promotional opportunity for WWE to help utilize our reach and our brand to create more excitement for WrestleMania this upcoming weekend.”
Some of the matches at WrestleMania 36 took place at the WWE Performance Center and some took place from undisclosed locations. WWE has already taped tomorrow’s episode of SmackDown and the RAW after WrestleMania.
