WrestleMania: Has The Grandest Stage of All Gotten Too Big?

Photo Source: WWE.com

The move to a self-owned streaming service gives WWE more leeway with how long programming can be. But with WrestleMania 34 on its way, have we gotten to a point of too much?

On February 24, 2014, WWE launched the WWE Network in the United States. Despite some performance issues at the beginning of its run, by the time WrestleMania XXX rolled around a few months later things were better, if not great. Now, there seems to be much less complaints about the quality of the service – at least in my circles – and the Network is an integral part of the WWE fabric.

With a move to a self-owned digital streaming service to air programming, WWE gave itself more freedom in its broadcasts. Rather than being hamstrung by cable providers hosting the pay per view events, there’s no check on how long a show can run. Since WrestleMania is the flagship event for WWE, it’s become a supersized show in the Network Era.

But how much is too much? Despite owning the platform the show broadcasts on, there’s talk every year that “WrestleMania is too long.” Surprisingly, the other WrestleMania talking point is that “there’s no room on the card” for certain matches. How can this possibly be the case? Either the show is too long because everyone ends up on the card, or there’s not enough room for, say, Sasha Banks vs. Bayley outside of the battle royal.

To find out which is the case, I dove into the numbers. For each of the WrestleManias in the WWE Network Era (2014-present), I looked just how much wrestling was on the show. That was compared to the total length of the main show, so we can see just how much time is “wasted” on a given Mania. I also examined how long the average match for each card was, to get an idea as to what we’re looking at for WrestleMania 34.

Read ahead for my findings…