5 days Ago By Adam Wells
Bleacher Report catches you up on the latest news from the WWE Universe. WWE Reaction to Tyson-Paul Streaming Issues One of the big storylines from the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight was Netflix's servers appearing to have an issue handling all of the people trying to watch a live event at the same time. Per Fightful Select (h/t Steve Carrier of Ringside News), WWE was assured by Netflix that any technical issues will be cleared up by the time Raw debuts on the streamer in January.
One thing that is important to note, which one WWE source told Fightful Select, is that an episode of Raw doing the same volume of traffic as the Tyson-Paul fight "would be a good problem to have." The Nov. 15 event from AT&T Stadium was plagued by buffering and lag issues throughout that made it difficult for fans watching to keep up with the action.
Despite the technical issues, Netflix announced 60 million households were tuned in to watch Paul get a victory by unanimous decision over Tyson. With respect to WWE's popularity, the idea of a random episode of Raw getting 60 million households to watch seems unlikely. The next big live-event test for Netflix's servers will be on Christmas Day when they will broadcast two NFL games.
Raw will be the next live event on Netflix after that when it debuts on Jan. 6. Nakamura's Return Kept Secret WWE went to great lengths to make sure word of Shinsuke Nakamura's return on the Nov.
15 episode of SmackDown didn't get leaked to anyone. Per Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful Select (h/t H Jenkins of Ringside News), Nakamura's return had been planned for several weeks but he wasn't listed on internal rundowns for the show. Sapp did note WWE included Nakamura's name on the script for the episode.
After LA Knight retained the United States title by defeating Berto in an open challenge, Nakamura attacked the champion to reignite their house-show feud that was going throughout the summer. Nakamura hasn't wrestled on television since losing to Sheamus on the April 22 episode of Raw. He did work a few dark matches on SmackDown after that, but has otherwise been working house shows against Knight and Cody Rhodes.
It appears that WWE has repackaged Nakamura for this heel run, as he was dressed all in black and referred to as the "wayward samurai" by the commentary team while attacking Knight. Hopefully this keeps Nakamura on television for awhile and gives LA Knight a better feud than the disappointing three-way battle with Andrade and Carmelo Hayes. Update on U.
S. Women's Title Bracket One week after announcing a tournament to crown the inaugural United States women's champion, WWE revealed the bracket during Friday's episode of SmackDown. Even though WWE had the bracket ready to go, Sapp (h/t Jenkins ) there was some internal discussion within the company to hold off a week on showing the bracket because they felt it would spoil the result of the Nov.
15 SmackDown. The main event of the show featured Nia Jax defending the WWE women's title against Naomi, who is also in the U.S.
women's title tournament. The thinking was fans would know Naomi wouldn't be beating Jax if they saw that she was in the tournament. It's not a bad theory if you treat WWE like a non-scripted sporting event, but it was hard to imagine a scenario in which Nia Jax was gonna lose in that moment coming off a loss to Liv Morgan at Crown Jewel.
Since the tournament started on Friday night, it also would have been weird to have a match without showing everyone that will be competing for the title. The only other option would have been to swap out Naomi for someone else, but she should probably on the shortlist of contenders to win. The two most interesting matches that could happen in the final are Bayley vs.
Naomi or Bianca Belair vs. Jade Cargill. We will find out soon enough what WWE has planned, since the champion will be crowned at Saturday Night's Main Event on Dec.
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