WWE: Survivor Series needs to have stakes to be more interesting

It was over five years ago when WWE brought back the brand extension. And because the roster spilt in half, Survivor Series became the PPV where members of the Raw roster faces members of the Smackdown roster.

Most of the matches will be Raw vs SmackDown. Usually, the matches on the card will a champion from Raw facing against a champion from Smackdown. For example, the WWE champion vs the Universal champion. You will also get the traditional five-on-five elimination tag team match but it’s now Raw vs Smackdown instead of team Seth Rollins vs team Edge.

At the beginning of the Smackdown vs Raw 2.0 era, the event felt fresh, interesting, and fun. But now feels stale and uninteresting. And the reason why Survivor Series feels stale is that the PPV has no stakes.

Whenever they do the Raw vs Smackdown theme, there aren’t any stakes around the PPV. It’s just who’s the better brand. They even keep scores on which brand has the most wins. But the problem is that no one cares about who has more wins now. That’s why they should end the theme or add stakes.

How can WWE make Survivor Series interesting?

One way they can make Survivor Series more interesting is whoever wins a match can receive a future draft pick for their respective brand. That way there is more purpose to do the brand warfare gimmick now.

Another way is whichever brand has the most wins, will have the last entrant for both Royal Rumble matches. That makes the event more intriguing and they now have something to fight for which is having the advantage to win the Rumble and main event WrestleMania.

They can move the draft on another date because holding the draft a month before Survivor Series doesn’t make sense. There are wrestlers who have been on one brand for most of the year, then move to another brand, and then act like they are loyal to the brand even though they haven’t been there for a month.

It makes the event worthless. This is why they should move the draft back to April or have it after Survivor Series. There’s no denying that they need to shake the rosters up because both shows felt stale and they needed new challengers for both world champions, but they should’ve done it earlier.

Survivor Series in the past two decades haven’t been at the level of good like it was in the early days. When Survivor Series first became an event, it was great because it was something that we have never seen before. But the event lost its luster in the 2000s.

The PPV briefly got a second chance of life when they add the Raw vs Smackdown gimmick. The first couple of times they did this, it was cool. The men’s five-on-five match from Survivor Series 2016 was great. I personally thought that it was a top ten match of that year. The entire PPV that year was good.

In 2017, they started doing the champion vs champion match along with the five-on-five match. Although the event was a mixed bag, it did have one of the best matches of the year. And that match was the WWE champion from Smackdown AJ Styles against the Universal champion from Raw, Brock Lesnar.

The next year, the event wasn’t great even though it had two match-of-the-year candidates. One was the Raw women’s champion Rhonda Rousey vs Charlotte Flair who replaced the Smackdown women’s champion Becky Lynch due to a broken nose injury. And the other match was the WWE champion Daniel Bryan vs the Universal champion Brock Lesnar.

It started to feel stale real fast in 2018 and they would’ve kept on doing this in 2019 if it weren’t for AEW. AEW Dynamite and NXT were head to head on Wednesday nights during that time. So, WWE added the NXT roster to Survivor Series and the event is now Raw vs Smackdown vs NXT to stop AEW’s rise. And they by letting NXT win most of the matches even though it didn’t stop AEW.

2019 was the last time they add NXT to the PPV because they went back to Raw vs Smackdown last year and this year. They will most likely do this theme again beyond next year. And because of that, no one really cares about Survivor Series anymore.

If WWE wants to make Survivor Series get back to the level that they were once were, they need to add a stipulation like the winner gets a future draft pick or the winner gets number 30 in both Royal Rumbles. If they don’t do this, the WWE universe will continue not to care about the PPV.