3 things that went wrong on the June 24 episode of SmackDown

Over the last few months, these episodes of WWE SmackDown have reached their low point in the heel Roman Reigns era. For a while, “The Tribal Chief’s” presence helped turn the Friday night show into the highlight of weekly WWE viewing. Now that he takes a more liberal approach to appearing on these shows, the star power and quality of these shows have done the same.

Reigns’ absence from these shows has exposed the pitfalls of relying on a handful of stars to carry the load. Now that a lot of these stars are either injured or too expensive to bring in on a weekly basis, WWE has to fill these shows with wrestlers who, while talented, haven’t been presented as credible stars.

At times, these wrestlers’ talent overcomes the bad booking, but other times, that is too much of an ask.

These are three things that went wrong on the June 24 episode of SmackDown.

Sheamus and Drew McIntyre have to co-exist to qualify for Money in the Bank

This week’s SmackDown felt like a creative response to any backlash WWE received for simply putting Drew McIntyre and Sheamus in the men’s Money in the Bank ladder match after both got disqualified in their qualifying match.

As a “remedy”, WWE went to a pair of tired tropes by having the rivals attempt to co-exist against undisputed WWE Tag Team Champions The Usos in the main event. In an overbooked-but-good outing, Sheamus and McIntyre picked up the win to re-qualify for the ladder match.

While you could argue that it makes sense that Paul Heyman would manipulate Adam Pearce into putting McIntyre and Sheamus in a seemingly unwinnable situation, WWE’s history made it hard to buy into the idea of them losing. Furthermore, booking the tag champions to lose a non-title match cheapens their reign and the Street Profits’ pursuit of those titles.

If WWE wanted Sheamus and McIntyre to respectively qualify, it could’ve scripted them to win separate matches, as this match showed.

Sonya Deville vs. Raquel Rodriguez and Lacey Evans

By now, you’d think that WWE would’ve learned that handicap matches where the heel is the outnumbered party work as well as an NFL offense with Nathan Peterman as the starting quarterback. That hasn’t stopped them from booking these matches, with the latest instance coming this week when Sonya Deville took on Raquel Rodriguez and Lacey Evans.

Under optimal circumstances, booking a heel to get heat on multiple adversaries by themself doesn’t resonate with the fans due to the inherent advantage the babyfaces have; if anything, it makes the babyfaces look bad for not immediately putting the heel away. Worse yet, it places the sympathy on the heel for having to navigate wrestling two (or more) opponents.

WWE tried to cover for this by framing the match as a consequence of Deville belittling Adam Pearce and having Shayna Baszler and Xia Li distract the babyfaces (which, again, made the faces look dim), but if you have to go to those lengths to generate heat, perhaps you should rethink the match altogether.

Natalya/Ronda Rousey segment

It’s telling that Natalya exhibited far more charisma while impersonating Ronda Rousey than the actual Ronda Rousey does whenever she cuts a promo. Nattie got some decent jabs in during this segment, but things went downhill when Rousey came out and, as a babyface, railed on Natalya for not having kids or choices that Natalya made with her body.

Every once in a while, Rousey’s narrow idea of feminism creeps up to the forefront in her promos (yet another reason why she shouldn’t be a babyface), but given the real-world events that played out before the show, it was especially unwelcome here.