POST IT NOTES
**Rewind-A-Raw is live at 11 p.m. ET with Wai Ting & John Pollock chatting about all the news coming out of the weekend along with a review of Raw in Norfolk, Virginia. The show will be streaming live at YouTube.com/POSTwrestling and available to download on the free POST Wrestling feed on your podcast app.
**On Tuesday, it’s the ASK-A-WAI Mailbag Show with Wai & I answering your mailbag questions for the entire show. Questions can still be submitted on the POST Wrestling Forum thread and the show will be released Tuesday evening for POST Wrestling Café members. For Café members, we will be recording the show live on Tuesday at 2 p.m. ET.
**On this week’s Wrestlenomics, there is a great discussion about the treatment of Rampage and how the show has fallen. This came after Brandon Thurston noted that none of the matches between Death Triangle and The Elite are scheduled for the Friday show and how WWE parlayed the importance of SmackDown from 2016 onward for its rights renewal two years later and securing Fox as its broadcaster. It is hard not to come to the conclusion that Rampage is seen as a show with a ceiling and that the biggest attractions and matches are better served on Dynamite.
**If you missed it, our Survivor Series POST Show is available with a 90-minute show covering the event and what worked and didn’t with our thoughts on the WarGames matches & more.
POST SCHEDULE
Tonight: Rewind-A-Raw with John Pollock & Wai Ting (11 p.m. ET)
Tuesday: upNXT with Davie Portman & Braden Herrington
Tuesday: ASK-A-WAI Mailbag Show (Patreon)
Wednesday: Shot in the Dark with John Siino
Wednesday: Rewind-A-Dynamite
Thursday: MCU L8R – Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas Special (Patreon)
Friday: Rewind-A-SmackDown with John & Wai (Patreon)
Saturday: The N.W.A Podcast with Nate Milton, Kris Ealy & Andrew Thompson (Live at 9 p.m. ET)
Sunday: Wrestlenomics Radio
WRESTLING NEWS
**AEW Dynamite averaged 880,000 viewers and approximately 421,000 (0.32) in the 18-49 demographic for last Wednesday’s episode on Thanksgiving Eve. In 18-49, it was their best performance on Thanksgiving Eve, which is a night that has always hurt them and the highest in the demo since 10/5. The show was up 8% from the previous week’s disappointing number going into Full Gear and was up by 13% in the 18-49 demographic. The big difference was male viewership, which was up sizably from the week prior while female viewership was down. In the 18-49 demo, males grew by 34% (its highest mark since 9/13) while females dropped 25% in the key demo (aside from the episode that aired on Tuesday last month, the lowest of the year in that demo). In the 18-34 demo, males grew by 58.5% and females dropped 8% and among adults 35-49, males increased by 20.5% and females declined by 33%. The show ranked sixth among cable originals for the night behind the World Cup game between Germany and Japan, coverage of the NBA doubleheader on ESPN, and college basketball. (Data courtesy: Wrestlenomics and Showbuzz Daily)
Here is how the show has performed on Thanksgiving Eve in the past:
*2022: 880,000 viewers and 0.32 in 18-49
*2021: 898,000 and 0.31
*2020: 710,000 and 0.26
*2019: 663,000 and 0.26
**WWE Raw takes place from the Norfolk Scope in Virginia tonight coming off Survivor Series. The first hour will be airing commercial-free with Becky Lynch kicking off the show and going against the Pittsburgh vs. Indianapolis Monday Night Football game. Raw is set to feature the blowoff match between The Miz and Dexter Lumis where Lumis gets a contract and gets his money from The Miz, if he wins. WrestleTix reports that over 5,600 tickets had been distributed as of Friday.
**Due to the Pac-12 Championship airing on Fox this Friday, SmackDown will be moved to FS 1 this week in the U.S. FS 1 will also air immediate replays of the show at 10 p.m. and Midnight ET, so the first replay will oppose Rampage on TNT.
**Survivor Series was a major success financially with the show setting a live gate record for the company in Boston as well as being the biggest in the history of the event going back to 1987. Paul Levesque added at the press conference that it was the most-viewed Survivor Series in history, which is aided by its distribution on Peacock which has access to so many more viewers than the pay-per-view and WWE Network era. This is the second year that the show was available on Peacock. The streaming service’s latest numbers surpassed 15 million paid subscribers and 30 million total users with access to Peacock.
**Twenty-five-year-old Jai Vidal announced on LGBT In the Ring that he has signed a contract with IMPACT Wrestling. Vidal was trained at Gangrel’s Wrestling Academy and has been wrestling for over six years. He wrestled on two episodes of IMPACT last year where he lost to Eric Young and JONAH. Since that time, he has been appearing on the show as Gisele Shaw’s content creator and personal stylist for the past several months.
**NXT performer Sarray posted a picture with the caption “Restart” over the weekend. The performer has not wrestled since August 2nd after losing to Mandy Rose on television and only had nine matches in 2022, according to Cagematch.
**Being the Elite was released on Monday and titled “F The Elite” covering the match from Chicago against Death Triangle. The most notable part was the exclusion of the CM Punk spots from the edited version of the match that ran.
**SmackDown had a unique issue on Friday night where the college football game between UCLA and California ran late and caused SmackDown to start around 8:12 p.m. ET. Instead of joining the show in progress, they started SmackDown from the beginning and therefore, had an overrun into the affiliate programming at 10 p.m. ET. We will see if this had any significant impact on the final number and whether any affiliates didn’t stay with SmackDown for the final ten minutes. On the flip side, they likely inherited a sizable audience from the college football game and started SmackDown with the reveal of Becky Lynch, which was the main thing on the show. In Canada, since SmackDown airs on both Sportsnet 360 and the local Fox affiliate, it was airing live on SN 360 and on a ten-minute delay on the affiliate.
**Friday’s episode of SmackDown on Sportsnet 360 in Canada fell to approximately 116,000 viewers and 39,000 in the 25-54 demographic and was its lowest audience on the network since July 29th. The show didn’t finish among the top ten sports programs, which is being dominated by World Cup soccer coverage.
**WWE is holding tryouts at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida on Wednesday and Thursday this week. SI.com reports that 30-35 athletes will be on hand for the tryout and overseen by several NXT talents and Big E. The story added that this will be WWE’s final tryout session of the year and will hold tryouts next February in Lagos, Nigeria, and another in late March prior to WrestleMania 39 in the U.S.
**After one week, Aussie Open is on top of the World Tag League tournament with six points followed by Tetsuya Naito & SANADA, Minoru Suzuki & Lance Archer, Great O-Khan & Aaron Henare, Hirooki Goto & YOSHI-HASHI, and TMDK with four points each. Hiroshi Tanahashi & Toro Yano and Bad Luck Fale & Chase Owens each have two points and Alex Coughlin & Gabriel Kidd and EVIL & Yujiro have zero. The Tag League continues Wednesday with five matches in Shizuoka (which will be a cheering event). The Tag League matches on Wednesday include Coughlin & Kidd vs. Fale & Owens, Suzuki & Archer vs. Henare & O-Khan, Aussie Open vs. EVIL & Yujiro, Naito & SANADA vs. TMDK, and Tanahashi & Yano against Goto & YOSHI-HASHI in the main event.
**Tuesday’s penultimate episode of Tales from the Territories focuses on Jim Crockett Promotions airing at 10 p.m. ET on Vice TV.
**The WWE stock continues to perform well and closed at $80.80 on Monday.
MMA NEWS
**The biggest story from the weekend was the first loss of Kayla Harrison’s pro-MMA career on Friday’s PFL Championship pay-per-view. Harrison dropped a unanimous decision to rival Larissa Pacheco, who Harrison beat twice in 2019 and was written off by many in the lead-up to this rematch. Judges Michael Bell, Doug Crosby, and Sal D’Amato had identical cards with Pacheco winning rounds two, four, and five with Harrison winning rounds one and three. Harrison has two fights left on her PFL contract and has said she will not participate in another tournament due to the amount of weight-cutting a season requires with so many fights. For one-off fights, it would seem like the obvious choice to hold a fourth fight with Pacheco and adds stakes to the third fight. Pacheco was among the six tournament winners that earned their purse along with the $1 million prize, which included Brendan Loughnane, Ante Delija, Olivier Aubin-Mercier, Sadibou Sy, and Rob Wilkinson.
ON THIS DATE
Jim Crockett Promotions staged Starrcade ’85: The Gathering with the event taking place from two separate locations at the Greensboro Coliseum and The Omni in Atlanta along with seventeen closed-circuit locations that led to a combined gate of $936,000. It was an enormous success built off the national profile JCP has risen to and headlined by Dusty Rhodes supposedly beating Ric Flair for the NWA Championship in Atlanta but ended up being a DQ finish. The Greensboro main event featured The Rock ‘N’ Roll Express winning the NWA Tag Team Championship from Ivan & Nikita Koloff and included the famous I Quit Match between Magnum T.A. and Tully Blanchard for the United States Championship.
Diesel (Kevin Nash) is interviewed by Vince McMahon two days after beating Bob Backlund for the WWF Championship at Madison Square Garden and kicking off his year-long run as champion.
Paul Heyman’s sit-down interview with Michael Cole following Brock Lesnar’s loss to Bill Goldberg at the Survivor Series in 2016:
*****
WRESTLENOMICS: WWE Survivor Series business
Brandon Thurston is joined by Chris Gullo and Jesse Collings to talk WWE Survivor Series business, AEW brand strategy and the decline of Rampage ratings.
*****
WWE SURVIVOR SERIES POST SHOW
John Pollock and Wai Ting review WWE’s Survivor Series event from Boston headlined by two WarGames matches including The Bloodline vs. The Brawling Brutes, Drew McIntyre & Kevin Owens.
*****
REWIND-A-SMACKDOWN/RAMPAGE
John Pollock & Wai Ting review Friday Night SmackDown & AEW Rampage and preview the Survivor Series. Plus, your calls & feedback.
*****
POST Road Diary: NY & NJ
John Pollock & Wai Ting travel to New York & New Jersey for the POST Wrestling 5-Year Anniversary Show and coverage of AEW Full Gear.
*****
REWIND-A-DYNAMITE
Wai Ting & Bruce Lord review the post-Full Gear edition of AEW Dynamite featuring Chris Jericho vs. Tomohiro Ishii for the ROH Championship.
*****
SHOT IN THE DARK
John Siino reviews this week’s editions of AEW Dark, AEW Dark: Elevation, IMPACT Wrestling, Women of Wrestling, NXT Level Up, NJPW Strong, NWA USA, NWA Powerrr, and WWE Main Event in under 15 minutes on Shot In The Dark.
*****
upNXT 11/22: Flip The SCRYPTS
Braden Herrington and Davie Portman chat all about the November 22nd, 2022 edition of WWE NXT headlined by Wes Lee vs Carmelo Hayes for the NXT North American Championship.
*****
REWIND-A-WAI #120: NWA-TNA PPV #25 (12/11/02)
John Pollock & Wai Ting enter the Asylum with a review of NWA-TNA #25 from December 11, 2002, featuring AJ Styles vs. Amazing Red and Jeff Jarrett vs. Curt Hennig.
*****
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