Smackdown is Live and so is The Dark Match
Welcome to the draft edition of The Dark Match. We come to you live tonight from Atlanta, GA & Los Angeles, CA, as the show itself makes its live debut in Worcester, MA (pronounced Wusstah).
What we know so far: Stephanie is the Commissioner of the flagship Raw brand with Mick Foley serving as the General Manager, while Shane O’Mac is the probably infinitely cooler Blue Brand (yes, I’m shamelessly plugging the show I’m going to head up for The Dark Match already) with Daniel Bryan serving in the role of Smackdown General Manager.
The Rules for the Draft are as follows, per WWE.com:
- Raw has the first overall pick
- Since SmackDown Live is a two-hour show and Raw is three hours, for every two picks SmackDown Live receives, Raw will receive three picks
- Tag teams count as one pick unless a Commissioner/General Manager specifically only wants one member of the team
- Six draft picks will be made off the NXT roster
I don’t fully support the idea of giving Raw additional picks every third round, as it would make more sense to just give them compensatory picks somewhere further down the draft board to ensure that the brands are split evenly with the talent from the top of the heap. Also not a huge fan of going ahead and announcing that there will only be six NXT call ups. Takes some of the anticipation out of it, but it did get me this tweet which made me incredibly freaking giddy:
6 is the magic number huh? Ok, bet. https://t.co/E5Ys0vLFFm
— Mojo Rawley (@MojoRawleyWWE) July 17, 2016
They were also kind enough to give us a full roster list of talent that will be Draft eligible, which it should be pointed out features only Brock Lesnar of the part timers (no Rock or Undertaker). Also, the Wyatt family is not listed as a team, and will in all likelihood be one of the groups split up on account of that.
We will come to you live this evening when Smackdown kicks off it’s live broadcast at 8 PM ET/5 PM PT.