The Ariel Helwani Show - The Uncrowned Wrestling Show | WrestleMania 42 Night One Review With A LOT Left To Be Desired

Episode Date: April 19, 2026

Solomonster is here with a WrestleMania 42 recap for Night 1 in Las Vegas with Cody Rhodes retaining the WWE title over Randy Orton in a match that turned into something of a mess psychology-wise and where things stand with Pat McAfee, new champions crowned including the return of a big women's name, Bron Breakker costs Seth Rollins, and Bianca Belair returns to make a MAJOR announcement.  Turns out she's going to be out of the ring quite a bit longer, but for a good reason!

Solomonster here with you, Jason Solomon, of the uncrowned wrestling podcast with a quick uncrowned update with WrestleMania 42, Night 1 in the books. We still got one more show left to go, but I wanted to hop on here. And just do a quick overview, quick recap for you, for what I thought overall was a very lackluster night one of WrestleMania. This was headline by Cody Rhodes and Randy Orton in the main event for the WWE Championship, a main event that for weeks was, hijacked by the inclusion of Pat McAfee, who has just been all over these segments on Smackdown. And they closed the show tonight with Cody Rhodes retaining the WWE championship over Randy Orton.

Pat McAfee was involved in the match. They tried to keep his involvement limited. But he was there. Jelly Roll made an appearance. And when it was all said and done, Cody retains the championship, although the psychology of this main event was just so ass-backed. backwards, it's just, it confounds me looking at what they did here.

But from top to bottom, I just thought, you know, we had seven matches on this show, and you're going to see a lot of people, and I think rightfully so, and I'm one of those people. I certainly felt it, you know, sitting here watching the show, who felt like there were more commercials than actual wrestling on this show. And if that's how you felt watching it, it was for good reason, because I don't think we got 90 minutes of wrestling here on night one of WrestleMania, but we got a lot of ads. and a lot of fluff in between the matches on this show. So I just felt like when it was over,

it really didn't feel like a WrestleMania. You know, usually it feels like a mania. It feels like, okay, this is a big deal. And this is the first time in a while where it just felt like any other show, you know, which to me is not how WrestleMania should feel. The other issue also is there were so many matches on this card, including the women's world title match,

and that to me was the most egregious part that just didn't get enough time. You know, you had Stephanie Vaccarin, live Morgan out there tonight wrestling and what has turned into one of the more heated rivalries on television in these last few weeks and these two women went out there

for the world championship and were barely given not even a full seven minutes of ring time which I mean to me is just inexcusable it's not like they had an overabundance of matches on the card tonight so it's just some baffling decisions

and time management with some of the stuff on this show there was some good there was some bad I'm going to run through the results here real quick and just chime in with my thoughts along the way. And again, I plan on doing the same thing Sunday night. After WrestleMania night, too, I'll hit you with another update. And then on Tuesday, we'll have a fuller review in the fallout from WrestleMania overall.

That'll be on the Uncrowned Wrestling show, which again, you can get on the Ariel Helwani show feed, or there is a dedicated feed for the Uncrown Wrestling show that you can subscribe to as well. But what they did was they opened the show. the show on ESPN 2. And so for WWE, this was a big deal because this was the first time that WrestleMania had ever aired on any of the ESPN platforms. And the first hour tonight was on ESPN 2, simulcasting on there. John Sina, of course, was the hosts of WrestleMania tonight, as he will be tomorrow night.

He was out there in his dapper suit to introduce everybody. He didn't really do a whole lot on the show tonight. He kind of stayed out of the way. But they open with L.A. Knight and the Uso's against Logan Paul, Austin Theory, and I Show Speed. And this was the second year in a row that Jay Uso has opened Night 1 of WrestleMania. This year in a tag team match last year, it was one-on-one, very different situation, a situation that really, I think, was polarizing would probably be a good word for it, him beating Gunther and tapping him out in a sleeper hold.

So a lot has happened in a year. but in this match, it really wasn't about the match. There really wasn't a whole lot to this. I Show Speed is out there and he's very athletic. What limited stuff he did, I thought, was impressive. But really, this was all just a setup to the post-match angle to get him away from the heels and get him cheered as part of the baby faces. And so we had a little miscommunication going on between Logan Paul, Austin Theory, and I Show Speed,

where L.A. Knight wins it for the baby faces. And when the match is over, Logan Paul didn't take too kindly to I Show Speed screwing things up for him. So he knocked him out and he was about to do some damage outside the ring. When the baby faces intervened, it ended up with Logan Paul spread out on the announced desk outside. And I Show Speed jumps from the top of the ring post all the way down crashing through the table and Logan Paul with a diving frog splash. It was very impressive. It's not an easy thing to do. he cleared a lot of distance on that very Logan Paul-esque.

And when it was all said and done, he's out there celebrating with the baby faces and they're yeetting up a storm. And I guess all's well that ends well. But, you know, the I show speed stuff, it's one of those things where, you know, at a time where we have so much celebrity involvement heading into this WrestleMania show that it's exhausting. I didn't mind his involvement so much. I thought he played his part fine. Again, it's like a mid-card match. It's not like it's a main event program on the show. So this was, it was inoffensive. I can't really say a lot about the match

because again, it was over in the blink of an eye. And it was really all about the big viral moment that they wanted with that diving splash when it was over. So you just wait until TV this week, and believe me, you'll hear Michael Cole and Joe Tessitore on commentary talking about how this one clip of I Show speed is racked up, you know, 500 million social views or something like that.

That's why they do it. You know, that's, at the end of the day, that's why they do these things. So the purpose that they wanted it to serve, it served. Now, the second match on the ESPN hour of this was the unsanctioned match between Drew McIntyre and Jacob Fattu. These two have been beefing now for a few months. And they had a good match. Nothing too terribly outrageous, even though it was an unsanctioned match.

So I wouldn't say it was overly violent. There was no blood or anything like that. They saved that for the main event. event. It was your typical W.W.E. Plunder match. You know, you had your slim gym tables and your chairs, but they made the most of it with the time they were given. Again, not a

super long match, but I thought this match, more than most on this show, it basically got the time that it needed. It got about 14 minutes or so. Jacob Fautu picks up the win in the end. I think that sets him up for a main event program.

You know, as we get a little bit deeper into the summer, maybe something with Randy York and at some point. That's kind of where I could see things going. There is always the possibility we could still end up with a four-way match, you know, for the championship at some point, which I know some people were like fantasy booking for WrestleMania. Maybe we would be Cody and Randy and Drew and Jacob, and they ended up going in a different direction. I wouldn't give up hope on that match at some point. I could see that ending up being a PLE match down the road, but this was good. Then we had the fatal four way for the women's tag team titles,

Naya Jackson Lash Legend, defending their titles against Charlotte, Flair, and Alexa Bliss, Bailey and Lyra Valchuria, and it was supposed to be the Bella twins. Now, if you haven't been following the news, Nikki Bella, she suffered an ankle injury on Smackdown a few weeks ago, and there was some hope that she would be medically cleared in time to be a part of the show. She was a part of the show, but she was not medically cleared to be in the match.

So when the bellows came out, Nikki was in a walking boot. She had her crutch. And she said she tried everything. She just wasn't able to get cleared. But she didn't want this to ruin her sister's moment. And so she made a phone call to a friend. And that friend ended up being Paige, who we've not seen in WWE in almost a decade. Page was an instrumental part of that, I would say, initial NXT era.

that era where the women really started to have a spotlight shown on them in a way that they didn't before when it was just the divas. And I remember that first NXT, PLE, I guess you would call it, back in 2014 that they had on the old WWE network, it was NXT arrival. And the match on that show was Paige against Emma. She was a vital part of that era and had a lot of success in a short period of time. she was still very young, you know, mid-20s, and she suffered a pretty serious neck injury. And she had surgery. There was another injury scare. And this is around 2017, and WWE would not clear her.

They said, we're never going to clear you. She's medically disqualified. They tried to come up with other roles for her on the show. They made her general manager, I think, on Smackdown at one point. She was leading, God, what was that faction name, Absolution or whatever it was. they had her doing different things and it just, you know, it didn't work out. And she ended up going to AEW, and they did allow her to wrestle. She won the AEW Women's World Championship, in fact, at Wembley Stadium a few years ago.

And that was really her, kind of the peak for her in AEW. And she didn't do a whole lot after that. So now the big shock is that not only is she back in WWE, but she's medically cleared to compete. And she came out, she got a great reaction coming out. I wish this was something that they really did a better job of keeping under wraps because it was spoiled. A couple of days ago, it would have been more impactful if it wasn't spoiled, but such as the nature of the internet in social media. So anyway, she came out, she got a great reaction. Nikki stayed at ringside for the match.

And again, not a whole lot going on here, really until Paige got the hot tag in. They were really building to it, you know, where Bree would try to tag her and they would cut her off. And so finally she tagged in Page and she went on this run of offense. And it all built to Paige getting the winning fall over Alexa Bliss and winning it for her team. So who would have thunk a week ago? We'd be sitting here talking about not the Bella twins as the new tag team champions, but the team of Bree Bella and Page, which just sounds completely random. It's like if you had a randomized generator and pushed a button, you know, this is the team that you would end up with.

But it was a nice moment for her. You could tell her she got very emotional when the match was over. She was playing it cool when she came out initially, but when the match was over, kind of the emotion started flowing. So it's good to see her back. And she's just another shot in the arm, I guess, for the women's division. I'm not knowing what show she'll end up on, ultimately. The women's tag team champions can float between brands.

So where she ends up settling, raw smackdown, we don't know yet. my thought process coming out of this match was they're not going to be the tag team champions for too long because once Nikki Bella gets cleared, let's say in the next few weeks, maybe the Bella's turn on her, they shoot some kind of angle there, but as it turns out,

on the post show, we learned, and I think Nikki tweeted something about this as well. She tweeted a video that not only is her ankle sprained, she tore, she sprained and she fractured it. She just, I mean, she pretty much ran the gamut of things that you could do to your ankle. And on social media, she posted a pretty gnarly photo of what looked like stitches in her ankle.

So this injury is a lot more serious than I think anybody expected, and I would not expect her back any time soon. So we may have Bree and Page as tag team champions for a while out of this. We had AJ Lee defending her women's interests. Intercontinental Championship against Becky Lynch. Funny as part about this, they had the Wonder Years who sings Becky's theme song out there to do a live rendition, and the frontman was not ready when they started playing the music,

and it was pretty clear they were lip-sinking out there. I don't know if that's a first for WrestleMania, but it was certainly pretty obvious that that's what they were doing out there. But the story here, Jessica Carr, was the referee. and Becky Lynch and Jessica Carr had been sparring off and on now for months so as soon as you saw that Jessica was the referee in this match, you had to know

that there was going to be something screwy going on. And again, they didn't have a lot of time out there. It wasn't like a terribly long match or anything like that. But it built to a spot where the referee ended up distracted. There was an exposed turnbuckle in the corner

and AJ went into it and then she took a manhandle slam from Becky Lynch and she regained her women's intercontinental championship. And I thought the match itself, I thought it was a solid match. I don't know if this was intended to be the payoff between AJ and Becky and they're both going to move on to other opponents. It didn't feel like a payoff to me. I mean, if it was, I didn't think it was a very good one.

But I also think that it's probably time to move on from this and let these women work with other people. But the match itself, even though it was solid, I enjoyed their match at Elimination Chambermore. I thought the match they had in Chicago back in February was better than this one. But this was fine. Then it was time for Gunther and Seth Rollins. This is a match that was randomly put together a few weeks ago.

The WrestleMania card has evolved a lot from what it was originally supposed to be. Paul Heyman himself just recently admitted that the original main events that were, I guess, penciled in, were going to be Roman Reigns against Seth Rollins and CM Punk against Braun Breaker. This ended up being a very different WrestleMania card. Those were two of several matches that got changed up. There was a rumor at one point

that Gunther was going to work Ray Mysterio. Ray Mysterio was out, though, with a couple of broken ribs. Seth Rollins was medically cleared. We didn't know if Braun Breaker would be. He had emergency hernia surgery a few months ago. And so this is what we ended up with. Not much of a story. going into it, but the potential for this to be a great pro wrestling match.

And unfortunately, up to this point in the show, we really didn't have a whole lot of great pro wrestling, at least not in ring, you know, bell to bell. So when these two guys came out here, I was looking for something special, what we got from them, I thought was a great match that had the ending that I think a lot of people, if you weren't expecting it, you should have. You should have been expecting it. Because we all know where Seth Rollins is headed after WrestleMania. He's headed for a feud with Braun Breaker.

That's where the story is. That's where the money is. Now, Bronbreaker was already medically cleared. They just didn't want to rush him back with very little build. They want to save the match. So, Bronbreaker showed up late in the match, and he speared the hell out of Seth Rollins outside the ring. Almost speared him out of his boots.

Referey didn't see this. They ended up in the ring. And Gunther got Seth Rollins trapped in the sleeper hole. He had nowhere to go. referee call for the stoppage. And then there was a second spear, a super spear. When Rollins got out of the ring, Bronbreaker had already gone all the way up the ramp.

And they had claimed that this ramp here at Allegiance Stadium was 75 yards. And he just charged down this ramp. Okay, he's sprinting down the ramp. And I'm looking at Seth Rollins. Who has to play like, you know, he's still kind of, you know, coming to his senses. Because otherwise, I mean, he looks like a frigging. an idiot if he just stands there and waits for this guy to make his way down to the rig.

It's like that scene out of Austin Powers with the steamroller. And the guy is standing there screaming and he's got plenty of time to move out of the way, but he just stands there the entire time. But when Breaker came down to the ring, you know what ended up happening here is that he hit the spear, but he didn't hit the spear. Because as fast as he's going, you know, when they talk about how he's so fast, he's been clocked. you know, when he runs, he's been clocked at 23 miles an hour. He's running like a maniac. And if he doesn't slow down and he just throws all of his weight and all of his might into the other guy, he's going to cut this guy in half. And the last thing they could afford is either one of these guys to get hurt again.

They're just coming back from injuries. So he didn't really hit a full-on spear. It didn't look the best, but they did what they needed to do. They established that Bronbreaker is back. Seth Rollins now has an issue. you even more so now to go back after this guy and get revenge. I would expect this to be the backlash match. They already have another PLE in a couple of weeks.

So it went pretty much exactly the way I expected it to. They went out there. They had an excellent pro wrestling match. Gunther gets a win, which he needed, because for him to lose in this situation would have been very stupid. And now Seth Rollins has even more of a reason to go after Braun Breaker. And most importantly, now we got them both back. breakers been out for a few months

Rollins has been out for a few months so that's going to be a shot in the arm on the raw side but I thought the beginning of this match they were going at it there and it felt more like an unsanction match than the actual unsanction match that we had earlier in the show

at that point they introduced the Hall of Fame inductees from the ceremony last night I will give some more thoughts on the Hall of Fame ceremony itself on the full uncrowned wrestling show this Tuesday, but for this they had, you know, Nick Hogan, Andre the Giants' granddaughter, Robin, and Jimmy Hart.

They were out on stage because the night before they accepted the Immortal Moment Award, which was awarded this year to the Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant match at WrestleMania 3. Demolition was out there. Axe and Smash, my favorite tag team. So happy to finally see them get their rightful place in the Hall of Fame. Dennis Rodman was on stage as well. They had the families of Bad News Brown and Sid Vicious, who did not get full inductions at the Hall of Fame.

They got what they call legacy inductions because they've since passed away. A little surprised to see Sid's son out there, given the rant that he went on earlier today. He was not happy about that Hall of Fame ceremony on Friday night and the disrespect that he felt or claim that he felt from WWE, the way they handled the induction of his father. But they were there on stage. AJ Style, Stephanie McMahon, they got separate entrances.

And that was it. I mean, after Stephanie came out at the end, they quickly cut away and it was on with the show. Or the ads, I guess you would say. But we had Stephanie Vicar and Liv Morgan for the Women's World Championship. This is one of the matches I was looking forward to here on this show. Liv came out to her new theme song, which she sings herself. They had showed the music video for it on Monday night.

He or she recreated it with a bunch of dancers on her way to the ring. So, I mean, between the big presentation with that and the fact that she had said she flew her entire family, you know, cross country to be there live for the show. I mean, it felt like the stars were aligned for a title change here, and that's exactly what we got. Well, unfortunately, what we didn't get was enough time for this match, because as big of a match as this was on night one. And this is, again, it's turned into a really personal issue between these two women. And Liv chose her. Live won the Royal Rumble this year and chose to go after Stephanie and her championship. They gave these women, I think it was six minutes and 50 seconds.

And there's just no excuse for it. You know, you've two nights of WrestleMania. There were already people who, frankly, should have been on this card who were completely left off the WrestleMania card this year. They didn't even get on. But you have a women's world championship match. And you can't spare more than six minutes and 50 seconds for this match. I mean, they were going through some spots early on, some key moves where it's like, hmm, normally we would see this a little bit later in the match.

That was kind of a dead giveaway that this might not be going very long. And it really didn't. And on top of that, we had interference from Raquel Rodriguez. We had interference from Roxanne Perez, you know, both on behalf of Liv Morgan. And it was too much for Stephanie Vicar. She got dropped with oblivion. Liv Pender. It felt more like a handicap match to me and not a very good one.

Dominic Mysterio came out to celebrate with his lady. They shot off some pyro. It was a big celebration for Liv winning the championship. But to me, this was the biggest disappointment of the night. And I really did. I think they did these two women dirty with their time management here. I just think it's ridiculous that for all of the ads and all of the bullshit that they give you, on this show. You have a world championship match. There's no reason you can't give these women

at least 10 minutes to go out there and tell a story and do their thing. So I felt like they got shortchanged. The match itself, nothing special. And I can't even put all the blame on them because I think they were handicapped just based on how much time they were given. But to me, this was the biggest disappointment of the entire night. John Cena came out at this point to announce the attendance, 50,816. That's what they claimed anyway. It looked full. They do a very good job of, at least making it look full. What the actual paid number is as compared to the people in the building. I mean, that'll be stuff for Dave Meltzer and other people to litigate. The bigger story here is that we had a surprise. And the surprise was Bianca Bel Air, the former women's

champion who we have not seen in a year. Now, that's not entirely true. She did. She did. a special guest referee spot, I think, at the Evolution PLE last year, but she has not been active for a year. The last time we saw her in the ring in a match was WrestleMania 41. She opened night two at Ria Ripley and E.O. Sky. And they had what I felt like was the match of the year. I mean, that match was fucking incredible. And unfortunately, she got hurt in that match. Ria Ripley, I think it was on a Tower of Doom, a suplex spot, landed on Bianca's hand and really screwed up her, it was really the knuckle that's been giving her problems. And she finally had surgery on the hand, I think in January.

I don't know where things stand in terms of her recovery. Now, when she initially came out, I'm like, oh, this is great. This is a good sign that maybe she's back or she's on her way back. As it turns out, she revealed to the world that she is pregnant. Her and Montez Ford are going to have a, well, we don't know if it's a girl or a boy. She had a little baby bump. She's still obviously very early in her pregnancy, but she is with child, which means that she's got more important things to worry about than getting back in the ring and having

wrestling matches. So we are not going to see Bianca Bel Air for a very long time, and it sucks because she's already been gone for a year. I mean, you talk about somebody who was in the prime of her career, she was rocking and rolling, and she misses a year with an injury that nobody expected her to miss a year with, and now she's starting a family. So we're not going to see her at least until after WrestleMania next year. So it was happy news, but I'm still bummed, you know,

that we're not going to see her back for a long time. They could definitely use her right now on the Smackdown side. But congrats to her and Montez-Fourd. That's very cool. And as John Cena said, the attendance number, 50,000 816. Technically, you could bump that up to 50,000, 817 now. And then we had the main event.

And, I mean, where do I even begin with this? We had Cody Rhodes defending the WWE championship against Randy Orton with Pat McAfee. And Pat McAfee got his own entrance. And he took his time coming down those 75 yards to get to the ring. Then Randy Orton came out. You know how slow. his entrances can be. So he had to make his way to the rig. Then it was Cody's entrance. And Cody had what I thought was actually a very cool entrance. They had these mannequins that were

done up to kind of look like Cody on stage. And they each had tights and other articles of clothing on that really tied into different periods of his career, different incarnations of Cody Rhodes. And then the real Cody Rhodes, he rose up from the stage. And it was, he rose up from the stage. And It was a very cool entrance. It was much better than the one he had last year. But they get in the ring, and we're doing the ring intros, and Pat McAfee swipes the microphone away from the ring announcer. He's going to introduce Randy Orton.

So we get through all these introductions, and the match is about to begin, and the McAfee takes the mic again, and he hits Cody in the head with it, and I'm like, what the fuck are we doing here? Like, what is this? This is the WrestleMania main event, and so they're beating up Co-Doh,

Cody and Cody's fighting back. And he gets McAfee outside the ring by the announced desk. And all of a sudden, there's jelly roll. And I'm like, well, I mean, I already had dubbed it the fantasy camp era of WWE. But this was just, this was like a fantasy camp WrestleMania made events here. You got celebrities galore. So jelly roll gets up on the announced desk and he did a little jelly elbow off the desk through the other one. Pat McAfee was laid out.

So this was their way. of taking McAfee out of the match at the very beginning, which is not a bad thing, but this just took forever because now they got to wheel a gurney out and they're going to strap them to the stretcher and they're going to wheel them to the back. By the time this match started,

I think from the moment McAfee first came out to make his entrance, from the moment the bell rang and the actual match started, it had to be 30 minutes that had gone by. It's just ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. But the good news is, at least McAfee was out of the picture.

So these two could go out there and have a wrestling match. The bad news is it was pretty fucking boring for the first half plus of the match, I would say. Very slow moving, very... I mean, they were pushing the narrative that Orton came into this match hurt. There were rumors all week long that Randy Orton might have a back injury.

And he was selling a back injury. And Cody is focusing in on the injury, which is a smart thing to do. But as the match is going on, it just feels like, man, Cody is really leaning into working very heelish. And Randy Orton is like working from, you know, from underneath trying to rise up through the pain. And then Randy Orton got busted open at one point on the ring post outside.

So now he's bleeding. And he's fighting from behind and the fans are kind of rallying behind Randy. And this, it just felt so ass backwards because Cody is the hero. Cody is the baby face champion here. Randy Orton is the one who attack. viciously all those weeks ago, and is the one who aligned with Pat McAfee, which they did in part to try to get more heat on Randy Orton. I mean, realistically, TKO wanted him to be a part of this to sell more tickets, but then it was up to them to figure out, okay, what role does he play here?

And they say, well, we could use Pat McAfee to get more heat on Randy Orton, which hasn't really worked. But I'm watching this match, and as it's playing out, just the psychology of it is all just ass backwards. But we got to a ref bump, and so you know when there's a ref bump, there's going to be bullshit as a foot. And sure enough, Pat McAfee races back down to the ring in a referee shirt. He's got a neck brace on. And he's going to count Cody out after an RKO.

Cody kicks out. So one thing leads to another, and this all leads to Randy Orton dropping Pat McAfee with an RKO, which got a huge baby face pop because nobody likes McAfee. So of course they're going to cheer Randy Orton for it. But then as soon as Orton gets back up, Cody catches him with his crossroads finish, and he pins him to retain the title. And Cody was bleeding too. I think he was bleeding from the top of his head because he's got the blonde hair

and his hair was getting redder and redder. So both these guys ended up bleeding. But then after the match, as Cody is celebrating his win, Orton snatches the title out of his hand and he blasts him in the head with it. And then he delivers a punt kick to Cody Road. We haven't seen a punk kick in quite some time. And then he poses with the WWE championship over Cody to close out the show. Now, I want you to just think about what I just described to you.

Cody Rhodes came into this match. And I know a lot of people already booing him, but he's not a heel. He's a baby face, right? They don't want to turn Cody Rhodes. They're afraid to turn Cody Rhodes because they don't have anybody to replace him right now. It would be stupid to turn him right now. So he's the baby face. Randy Orton is the heel, right?

They come into this show. Again, Pat McAfee is aligned with Randy Orton. But they have Orton RKO him to write him, hopefully write him out of all of this because he said coming into this, if Randy Orton doesn't win, you'll never see me or hear from me again. We're going to hold you to that. So he RKO's Pat McAfee to get rid of him, which is a total baby face move. All that did was get the fans to cheer for Orton even more. But then after the match is over and he loses, he just hits Cody in the head with the belt and punk kicks him in the head. And it just felt to me like, okay, we had to include Pat McAfee in this because this is what TKO and Ari Emanuel wanted.

They worked out this whole thing where Pat McAfee is going to get involved and the cross-promotion, the synergy with ESPN, right? This is the first ESPN WrestleMania. And he'll help promote the show and get more eyeballs on the show and sell tickets to the show. and it's debatable how much of an impact he had on that. But now that we're here, we don't want him involved anymore, right? Because we're not worried about selling tickets to WrestleMania anymore. We need to get back to what the story was, which was between Cody Rhodes and Randy Orton, two men with a shared history. So let's get rid of this fucking guy.

And we can get back to what we were going to do in the first place, which is great. But again, the psychology of it was just completely backwards. And so it felt like this was a reset, and they're going to pick up with Cody and Randy now into the spring. And who knows, maybe the summer. And hopefully Pat McAfee won't have anything to do with any of this. That's the one good thing to come out of this. But this main event here, I'll say this. This was a better main event than John Sina versus Cody Rhodes was last year.

When they botched that one up, remember Travis Scott coming out during the match? Yeah, I haven't forgotten. this was better than that, but not by much. I was kind of bored for most of the match. And honestly, you know, McAfee's involvement, even though they kept it limited during the match itself, just him being involved in this story at all, and it was all about him.

I mean, it was like he sucked up all the oxygen in the room when it came to this story. Really soured me on this entire thing, which sucks because this was a match I was looking forward to and a story I was looking forward to for a long time. and I just think that they, you know, they just really suck the life right out of it. Now, hopefully with him out of the picture, you know, they could pick up with it and do some fun stuff from here on out. I don't know if they're going to run this matchback at Backlash or save it for another event.

Again, Backlash is in a couple of weeks in Tampa. I would imagine that there would be a rematch on that show. I still think Orton ends up winning number 15 very soon. He didn't do it tonight. I think it will happen in these next few months. But yeah, when WrestleMania was over, I was just very nonplussed by the whole thing. It just never really felt like a WrestleMania to me. Now, of course, it's not over yet.

This was only night one. We still have night two. Night two on paper to me is the stronger show. It would take a hell of a bad show, I think, for night two to be worse than night one. I mean, night one had its pros and cons, but by and large, I just didn't think it was a very good show. I think night two is probably going to be a very good show. I'm trying to be optimistic here. I'm looking at this card on paper.

Obafemi and Brock Lesner is opening the show tomorrow. And then from there, you go to this big six-man ladder match for the intercontinental title. That's a hell of a way to open up that first hour on ESPN. Sammy Zane and Trick Williams' U.S. title, very interesting dynamic there with fans cheering for Trick and booing Sammy. Again, it's all very ass backwards. I do think we're getting a double turn there. You have Demon Finn Baller taking on Dominic Mysterio. you have Jade Cargill defending the women's championship against Ria Ripley.

And then in the main event, CM Punk defends the World Heavyweight Championship against Roman Rains. I do think Orton not winning the title tonight makes a Roman win a little bit more likely tomorrow. I'll tell you what my fear is. My fear is that this Pat McAfee shit is not over with yet. And maybe it's over with Randy Orton. But he may show up again tomorrow night and help Roman win the championship and end up siding with Roman. Maybe I have some Pat PTSD. I don't know. But he's been very complimentary of Roman

Raines this week. So that has me a little bit worried. I don't want to see him anywhere near that match. But there are some matches I'm definitely looking forward to tomorrow night. But just, you know, don't, don't be afraid to let your wrestlers go out there and wrestle. Like, the name of the show is WrestleMania. And between all of the, it's the constant bombardment of just ads in between every single match and the fact that if you tally up the amount of time that was dedicated to that relative to actual wrestling and action on this show, you just see how lopsided it is. And when you have certain matches that, again, you have a few that have been playing out now for a few months.

And this is WrestleMania. This is the big payoff. And they don't get enough time to really go out there and build something special. You know, if you're not going to do that at WrestleMania, then when the hell do you do it? like WrestleMania should be held to a higher standard than an episode of Smackdown, you know, or an episode or an installment of Saturday night's main event, which is more like what night one felt like. I don't want to see that when night two.

I'm hoping night two can help kind of restore that feeling a little bit. But also with six matches as opposed to seven, hopefully some of the key matches can get the time they need. So we'll find out. And when that show is over tomorrow night, I'll pop in here with another update for WrestleMania Night 2. And then again, we'll have a kind of a, fuller view of everything on Tuesday on the Uncrowned Wrestling show.

Thoughts on the Hall of Fame. There was a big title change on AW television this past week, so we'll talk about that as well. But for now, I'm going to get some sleep, and then we'll do it again for WrestleMania Night 2. I'll see you guys then. Take care.