SmackDown Preview: This Much Wrestling Shouldn’t Be Surprising

WWE puts on a lot of television every week. In theory, it’s all wrestling. But sometime’s that’s not the case.

Look at our Raw preview from yesterday, where WWE was advertising two talking segments and one match. Promos are part of the package, sure, but the action is still core to the show.

SmackDown gets it. Tonight’s show is advertising three big matches, each of which has been built up in the weeks gone by and each of which has consequences for things going forward. It’s like… it’s a wrestling show. And that shouldn’t be surprising, but it is.

But hey, this is a preview article, not a diatribe on WWE’s programming problems. (At least in theory.) Let’s run down those matches.

John Cena has his first match back tonight against Baron Corbin, who’s proven to be a solid heel hovering around SmackDown’s main event scene. With Cena having a championship match at the Royal Rumble and Corbin being positioned as a favorite to win the main event, the odds of a true finish for this one seem nil–but SmackDown has certainly surprised us before.

There’s also a championship on the line tonight, as American Alpha defends their newly-won tag team gold against former champs in the Wyatt Family. Alpha, as much as I love them, are still underdogs in this fight, but the increasing tensions between Randy Orton and Luke Harper offer a fair bit of drama as to this match’s conclusion.

And yes, Nikki, we know it was Natalya that attacked you at Survivor Series. It’s been pretty clear ever since that moment that was precisely what happened. But hey, they’ve been sticking with what would otherwise be a tossed-off Total Divas storyline for an impressively long time, so points for consistency. Nikki and Natalya look to settle things in the ring tonight.

Should be a fun show tonight, and it goes down live as always on the USA Network at 8PM Eastern/7PM Central. We’ll have all our usual live coverage, so stick around here, on Twitter, and on Facebook for all the latest as it happens!