Reason WWE Booked Dolph Ziggler to Vacate the United States Championship
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As many of you have seen recently. WWE is now doing picture-in-picture advertising on the SmackDown Live brand on Tuesday nights. This was apparently the USA Network’s idea as they plan on doing it for other shows. The idea is to keep the viewers from changing the channel during commercial breaks.
It’s worth pointing out that WWE is only doing the picture-in-picture advertising for the non-important matches and are still doing full-on commercials for their bigger matches. This past Tuesday on SmackDown they did normal commercial breaks for the AJ Styles vs. Dolph Ziggler match and other popular matches.
WWE officially announced that John Cena will be making his return to WWE programming on the July 4th episode of SmackDown Live.
To combat low ratings, WWE is planning a big show for July 4th with Randy Orton vs. Jinder Mahal, Kevin Owens vs. AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura vs. Dolph Ziggler.
As seen on Tuesday’s episode of SmackDown Live, Dolph Ziggler defeated AJ Styles cleanly in the main event of the show.
Bryan Alvarez speculated on today’s installment of Wrestling Observer Radio that the finish appeared to be botched. It’s believed that the finish was supposed to see a three-count with Styles having his foot on the rope, however Ziggler screwed it up when he grabbed Styles foot as he went for the pin. The announcers even played into this finish by making mention of his foot being on the rope but quickly re-worded as they processed what had happen.
Dave Meltzer also mentioned on Observer Radio that with Ziggler defeating Styles clean on the show, he expects the two to have another match on either next week’s show or the week after so that Styles can get his win back. The company would have used the foot on the rope as an excuse for the rematch, but because it was botched that won’t be the case.
Dolph Ziggler announced on the WWE Backlash Kickoff pre-show that his match against Nakamura will be the opening match of tonight’s show.
You can check out our live coverage of tonight’s show at this link. We also have our live fan discussion on our new social media site at RingsideTalk.net!