WWE’s Raw & Smackdown Brand Split Ending Isn’t Fixing Real Problems
A recent report explained that WWE may be in the process of ending the brand split between Monday Night Raw and Friday Night SmackDown, but that won't solve the company's biggest booking issues. Ever since it was reintroduced back in 2016, dividing wrestlers up between the red and blue brands has been about as divisive as the act itself. The purpose was to drive viewership for each show, with fans knowing they'd only be able to see their favorite wrestlers on particular nights, but that isn't how things worked out.
In true Vince McMahon fashion, he played fast and loose with his own rules, and it didn't take long for the brand split to lose meaningfulness. The top stars from Raw would show up willy-nilly on SmackDown and vice-versa, making the divided roster meaning nothing, the draft mean nothing and took the wind out of Survivor Series' sails on a yearly basis.
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The brand split succeeded in one area, though: it generated a bit more opportunity for mid-card acts to get television time. Sure, the likes of Brock Lesnar and Roman Reigns were appearing on both Mondays and Fridays, but recent NXT call-ups and women outside of the Four Hoursewoman of WWE were generally firmly planted on either Raw or SmackDown. This created television time and opportunities to get over, with recent positive examples of this being Theory and Raquel Gonzalez.
The brand split was far from perfect, but it at least created opportunites in a vaccuum. Five hours of television was split evenly between two rosters, hungry for the spotlight. The end of the brand split would mean the end of that pariety. While McMahon would skirt the rules for the likes of Reigns, midcarders were
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