WWE: Royal Rumble Update, Drew McIntrye on Undertaker’s Issues with Current WWE, Updated SD Ratings

Jan 27, 2021

WWE Revealing Top Women’s & #30th Men’s Royal Rumble Entrants on WWE Backstage

FOX recently announced that WWE will be officially revealing the first two entrants for the Women’s Royal Rumble match and the thirtieth entrant for the Men’s Royal Rumble match during this Saturday’s special episode of WWE Backstage on FS1.

Who will be the 30th entrant in the Men's #RoyalRumble and the #1 & #2 entrants in the Women's Rumble? Find out exclusively on #WWEBackstage!

📺: Saturday 8e/5p on @FS1 pic.twitter.com/k7OMTwNPmc
— WWE on FOX (@WWEonFOX) January 26, 2021

In regards to why WWE is announcing key entrants and surprises early, including Edge’s Royal Rumble return, Fightful Select reported (via Sportskeeda.com) that this is due to the lack of live fans in attendance for this year’s event and the company and FOX wanting to maximize interest for this Saturday’s WWE Backstage show.

Drew McIntyre Responds to Undertaker’s Issues with Current Era WWE Product & Wrestlers

As noted before, The Undertaker was the guest on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast. During the interview, Undertaker stated that he finds WWE’s current product to be a struggle to watch and mostly blamed today’s era of WWE talent for making shows “a little soft” due to them being “too much pretty and not enough edge.”

Sportskeeda held a recent interview with Drew McIntrye and one of the topics discussed included his thoughts on Undertaker’s criticisms with WWE’s current product.

“I don’t agree whatsoever, especially from an in-ring perspective. I’m not sure, I listened to part of it, I gotta listen to the whole thing because it’s pretty new, but I think he might have been referring to storylines and characters, etc. The co-host that was on the show was a fan from the Attitude Era and I think they were perhaps referring to some of the outlandish storylines back in the day that were more sexual-based, more risque, 18+. Our current product is PG. There’s only so far you can push it and we’re willing to push it. There’s certain things from back in the day that was awesome and certain things that were not awesome that I wouldn’t want to go back to, so I’m not sure if it was more from that perspective when it comes to the stories and not being as adult based as it used to be. I think we’re walking a good line right now, but when it comes to the in-ring game, that’s just not true at all. It’s never been more physical.
The in-ring talent right now, we’ve been the best in-ring roster of all-time. If you look at our talent from top to bottom what they can do in the ring, what they can pull off from a storytelling perspective in the ring and a physical perspective, especially, there’s nobody better. You look at back in the Attitude Era, you compare the matches. Turn the volume off and watch the match quality and compare it to now, there’s no comparison. Then the Ruthless Aggression Era is when things really stepped up in-ring wise. But now, there’s no roster like ours in the world. We’re physical, hard-hitting athletes that can do things that are just absolutely mind-blowing, so it certainly wasn’t the in-ring part he was talking about. I know first hand because I’m the one hitting most of the people and they’re asking me to stop hitting them so hard.”

Updated WWE Friday Night SmackDown Ratings

This past Friday’s episode of WWE Friday Night SmackDown drew a final viewership of 2,383,000 on FOX, according to Showbuzz Daily. This was up compared to the initial overnight number of 2,282,000 viewers on the network.