Women’s Wrestling on TV in 2022

Note: this is an ongoing project that will be updated throughout the year as more or better information comes in, or any corrections need to be made.  All the data on matches and match times were taken from http://www.profightdb.com and http://www.cagematch.net.

All numbers are based on final tallys for the year, with any necessary corrections as discovered.

For anyone new to what I’m doing here, I logged all of the televised women’s matches for WWE, AEW, and Impact through all of 2021.  I did this because I got some bad vibes from the way it looked like women’s matches were being treated on Friday Night Smackdown and I wanted to find out if there something to what I was thinking. Now like I’ve said many times the number of matches are not the end all be all of judging how well the shows treat their women’s divisions. Promo segments, backstage scenes, are equally and sometimes more important as the mere existence of matches, even great ones.  But in every company the men’s side seems to get in all the matches they need every week, and some more that they don’t need, so yeah we do need to count just how many matches the women are getting and how much time they get.  Promo segments, vignettes and other things are supposed to go along with matches and should not be taken as a suitable replacement for having matches at all or limiting those matches to two minutes.  

As it was last year and every year before, the biggest problem in women’s wrestling right now on TV is rationing.  Too often the women’s side of the ledger is treated like a quota system – every week they get X number of matches (usually 1 or 2), X number of segments, etc while on the men’s side it feels like no one is keeping count at all.  With the number of women working for each company there’s no reason to have an unofficial (as far as we know) but very rigid quota every week.  This also applies to the big names like the Horsewomen and Bianca Belair in WWE, Britt Baker and Jade Cargill in AEW and Mickie James in Impact. These women who are at the top of the profession are often ushered in and out in five minutes or less for promos (ten if they’re interrupted and some incident happens) while several men get to monologue for ten, fifteen minutes at a time even if it’s not hitting with the crowd.

And then there’s the other issue. Non title feuds continue to be in short supply across American women’s wrestling. In 2022 there were two women’s matches (gimmick matches notwithstanding) on a WWE Pay Per View that were not for a title, and both of those were tag matches involving the women’s champions. Now there were several feuds that played on television but most of them came and went after a few weeks and didn’t even have a proper ending. Overall the presentations of women’s feuds that are not for a title leaves a lot to be desired across the industry. Some do it better than others, but they could all do better.

All that being said, let’s get to it: how were things for the women’s divisions on TV?  As with 2021 I am looking at the following data points, for the entire year:

1. Total number of matches
2. Number of matches every week
3. Time for each match, more specifically were the matches less than four minutes or not and how many got to go more than 10
4. How many women wrestled on each show
5. How many main events have the women had. And by main events I mean matches that ended the show, not just the last match on the show as some episodes end with promo segments, contract signings etc.

I gave each show a grade based on how they handled all those things in total. RAW being three hours puts it in a different place in that they should have more of everything just because, so as a result my grades are a mashup of individual performance and relative performances.  So for example in last year’s report it was noted that NXT had almost the same amount of matches as RAW for the year despite having an hour less every week of TV time to work with, which was great for them while reflecting badly on all the other two hour shows that fell far short of what they were doing. And should RAW fall short of shows that have less running time then they will be penalized accordingly.

Two things before we move on: I changed the time threshold for what I’m calling a short match now. What I’ve found from watching so many matches is that five minutes wasn’t the point where matches go from feeling rushed to feeling like they were able to get everything in. There are lots of good, or at least good enough, matches that run between four and five minutes and adding 15 seconds to a match that went for 4:45 doesn’t magically make it better. I chose four because that lines up a lot better with that kind of transition from bad to good. The other change is how I count mixed tag team matches. I included mixed tags and intergender matches last year because there were only a handful and they didn’t skew the results. Early on this year they did affect the results on RAW and AEW Dynamite, so I made the decision to exclude them in the overall match count but still credit the women who were in them and still record the match time. It turned out to be a nonfactor in the long run.

Anyway, how did everyone do this year? Let’s see:

Monday Night RAW

• Total matches: 87, down from 109 in 2021
• Matches per week: 1.71, down from 2.09
• Matches under four minutes: 32
• Women with over 10 matches: 11
• Women wrestling per week: 4.98, down from 5.81
• Main event matches: 15
• Best Month: May – 2.8 matches per week, 6.8 women wrestling per week
• Worst Month: November – 1.5 matches per week, 3 women wrestling per week

RAW was really strong for most of 2021 but fell way back in 2022. They had twenty episodes with only one match this year, almost double last year’s total of eleven. Last year they had fourteen episodes with three matches or more vs. four times hitting that mark this year. Eight women were getting regular, almost weekly ring action (nine if you count Lacey Evans prior to going out on maternity leave) vs. four or five at a time this year. Last year six women logged in over 20 matches on RAW, two of which got over 30, while in 2022 only four crossed the 20 match mark and no one got to 30. And this year a quarter of the division was effectively benched for the last four weeks going into WrestleMania despite being able to go, a practice that was reprised from September through November. The only thing that RAW surpassed from last year was the number of times women got to main event, up to 15 from last year’s 10, otherwise it was a step back in every way measurable. Injuries did factor in, but there were multiple stretches this year where they had 10 or more women available who could have been used and just chose not to, a practice that took place under both Vince McMahon and HHH.

What’s been good about RAW this year? Well, Bianca Belair, Rhea Ripley, and Liv Morgan did very well as the workhorses of the show through the doldrums of January through April as the rest of the roster wasn’t consistently used. All three logged in over 10 matches by the end of April, and Liv got to 20 before she moved to Smackdown. The gauntlet match the week of Elimination Chamber was a great showcase for the roster as a whole, and the run up to WrestleMania in March did feature some fun matchups with women from Smackdown coming over to set up the tag team title match. Bianca’s short April feud with Sonya Deville, and Asuka and Alexa getting regular weekly action since returning in April were post-Mania highlights, and the first week of May had an excellent six woman tag team match that main evented and went 15 minutes. The return of Bayley coupled with the call ups of Iyo Skye (formerly Io Shirai) and Dakota Kai have breathed some new life into a roster that had become stagnant and needed some new matchups and conflicts for the rest of the year. Then in December they opened the month with a resurgence the first two weeks to the tune of 2.5 matches and 6 women wrestling per week before crapping the bed on December 19th when they only ran one match. And while my study is not one of match quality it needs to be noted that despite it’s volume issues the match quality has remained as high as it was last year.

Final grade: B-. The pre-WrestleMania period was inconsistent at best and often bad. The week before Backlash was looking like a ‘wake up’ point for the year. From then through Hell in a Cell they booked two matches a week and had seven main events. The post-Cell period, however saw a regression from 2.5 matches for 6.67 women to 1.66 and 4.75, respectively. HHH’s run as head of creative was a mixed bag on this front. The top feud between Bayley’s faction Damage Control and the trio of Belair, Asuka, and Bliss has been given a lot of time and importance but the overall match numbers through the end of the year, 1.62 and 4.33, are behind the averages for the entire year and are downright atrocious. HHH removing the 24/7 title segments and retiring the title effectively took one match every other week out of the equation. RAW’s best work has been at an A level but there have been too many low points to give them an A for the year, especially when you compare it to last year’s “A” performance. November was their worst month for the year, and a mostly improved December kept them from falling to a C but 2022 was clearly a step back. For the show with the deepest roster of TV caliber women wrestlers to have regressed this much in a year is sad.

How to improve in 2023: Book more matches! This really is a case where the simplest solution is the easiest, and they did it just last year! The other pieces to the puzzle were handled pretty well all year – promos, vignettes, etc. Those five weeks in May were on par with what NXT has done this year, but then they slipped back. They need to keep it up all year and to do as they did with a three hour show and over 10 capable women who have been in big pay per view matches on big shows is inexcusable. Book a feud of some kind that is not a title feud, or a title adjacent feud like Becky vs. Asuka became. There is enough time and there are enough women to have a few just get into some kind of beef with each other.

Smackdown (Numbers Final)

• Total matches: 69, up from 68 last year
• Matches per week: 1.32, up from 1.31 last year
• Matches under four minutes: 30
• Women with over 10 matches: 9
• Women wrestling per week: 3.9, up from last year’s 3.48
• Main event matches: 3
• Best Month: August – 1.5 matches per week, 6.75 women wrestling per week
• Worst Month: January – 1.25 matches per week, 2.5 women wrestling per week

Smackdown did not change much from last year in total, for good and ill. There have been some egregious offenses this year like the 3 second match between Natalya and Aliyah, which was the only match that week, three weeks with zero matches, a ‘match’ on May 6 between Charlotte and Aliyah that ended with Charlotte beating Aliyah down before the bell rang and being intercepted by Ronda Rousey, and two more ‘matches’ in back to back weeks in July where Aliyah went to the ring and no match happened. And like RAW they disappeared a third of their roster for the month leading into WrestleMania. The six pack challenge that took place on June 3 was as good a microcosm as one could get for the division at that time; minus Charlotte, Sasha, and Naomi the ladies who were there got less than five minutes for all six to do something and finish the match. A similar thing happened in September where a Fatal Five Way elimination match went less than five minutes as well. But to their credit, they did start booking more women on the show after HHH took over.

Smackdown in 2022 was a tale of three periods: January 1 through May 13, May 20 through HHH taking over, and after HHH took over. The first had some pretty bleak spots. Despite Charlotte working the fewest matches on TV so far in her career and Sasha missing almost all of January and since May 13, no one new got much experience in their places. As great as Naomi was this year she has been TV regular for much of her career. Aliyah had four weeks of matches with Natalya in January but that came to an abrupt end in February with nothing replacing it until a beat the clock challenge in April and then she went another five weeks without a match. Xia Li, who is still very green and could use the reps, has only had ten matches on Smackdown all year. Shotzi only had two until the last week of April (the same beat the clock challenge as Aliyah). Shayna Baszler, after being the busiest woman on TV last year with over 40 televised matches, didn’t get in the ring on TV until March 11. Yikes. Before HHH took over the overall roster usage was terrible, as Vince only started to regularly go beyond Charlotte/Sasha/Naomi/Natalya when the first three were gone.

Were there some positives during those four-plus months? First and foremost, Naomi. From her singles program with Charlotte that landed a Match of the Year candidate in February to teaming with Rousey through Elimination Chamber to hooking up with Sasha Banks to revive the tag division, she has to be in the running for an MVP award this year. She’s done it all this year through May and should be commended. Beyond that there’s Sasha’s ring work from March through early April and the three main events they ran, which was as many as the entire year last year. There have been a few completed feuds so far this year that did not revolve around a title, Naomi vs. Sonya Deville, Liv Morgan vs Deville, and Natalya vs. Aliyah; a fourth between Aliyah and Shotzi was brewing but was shelved and replaced with one between Aliyah and Lacey Evans which also ended abruptly without warning. And in the last week of April they had four women’s matches, the most in any episode since at least 2020. But the deployment problems remained through July as they did for most of 2021.

Then an unexpected obstacle emerged in the form of Naomi and Sasha’s suspensions. Smackdown lost the two women who worked the most on TV this year until their departure, and was without Charlotte after WrestleMania Backlash in May. Nothing reflected that more than Nattie winning the six pack challenge on June 3 to face Rousey at Money in the Bank, and then Morgan cashing in Rousey to win the title after that match was over. Morgan’s title win was a big moment but it was also a necessary move because quite frankly they needed another woman that they could use regularly on TV. Since HHH took over Shotzi, Raquel Rodriguez, Aliyah, and Xia Li have seen more regular action, and the average number of women wrestling every week has gone up to 4.6, but there’s still a void in what should be the top half of the roster, leaving Rousey without a believable challenger during either of her two reigns until Charlotte came back on December 30.

Final grade: C. They slightly exceeded last year’s numbers, which were not good but are par for the Smackdown course since 2020. They continue to give us only one match most weeks, but I’m going to keep banging the drum for two matches to be a regular and not sporadic thing. Well at least they didn’t have the women’s champion waste two months chasing the tag team titles like last year, which is a plus. HHH has been a Godsend on this front; in his 22 weeks on the job they’ve had more matches and more women wrestling per week than any stretch this year, with more women wrestling than RAW over that run. By mid-August they were climbing and did not look back.

How to improve: Keep up the pace that’s started under HHH, and don’t let things regress.

Before we go any further, let me sum up RAW and Smackdown this way: they do a mostly good job at showcasing the top third of the division. On RAW Becky, Bianca, and Rhea Ripley are treated as important all the time, Asuka always gets on TV and is always talked up as if she’s a big deal. Room gets made for Alexa Bliss, and so far so good for Bayley, Io, and Dakota. On Smackdown Ronda Rousey and until they both left Charlotte Flair and Sasha Banks were always showcased and highlighted. Naomi was finally getting the time she always should have gotten and Liv Morgan graduated to being a TV regular on RAW before moving to Smackdown, then stayed one through most of the year. Sonya Deville has turned into a pretty good plug and play heel this year.

There has been a lot to be desired in both places, though. Rhea Ripley was in virtual limbo before May and lost the only attempt to give her a meaningful singles match when she had to miss Money in the Bank due to injury. Doudrop and Nikki ASH have been jobbed out all year and Bliss spent months doing nothing meaningful. Lacey Evans was inexplicably featured in five weeks of vignettes on Smackdown, then sent to RAW where she cut one promo, then sent back to Smackdown. The newer women on Smackdown (Shotzi, Raquel, Aliyah) were very inconsistently booked from week to week before HHH took over. And come mid-October RAW had seven women who’d been booked well to have interesting matches on TV but six of them were in one feud, which quickly turned them into a one match show half the time starting in September. Lynch returning from injury in November not coincidentally saw a bigger commitment to booking more matches on Mondays, but there were enough good women wrestlers to do that sooner. The virtual surrender that is commonplace when Lynch or Flair or Banks have taken time off needs to stop already.

On both shows anyone not in a title program is not safe from the now you see them now you don’t treatment. There was no excuse this year to put a quarter of the roster across both shows in mothballs for a whole month going into WrestleMania, nor to keep up the on and off routine that happened on Smackdown for much of the year. It was better on Raw in May in December but not enough to relieve any of the pressure we should be putting on them. Going into Summerslam everyone outside the title picture on RAW was relegated to short tag team matches while on Smackdown we got two weeks of matches involving Aliyah and Lacey Evans that were announced but ended before the bell even rang. Things are looking up on Smackdown since HHH took over in terms in raw numbers, but there’s been a lot of smoke and mirrors like Damage Control working both shows and multi-woman matches to pad the numbers.

NXT (numbers final)

• Total matches: 125
• Matches per week: 2.39, up from 1.92
• Matches under four minutes: 45
• Women with over 10 matches: 18
• Women wrestling per week: 6.6, up from 5.14
• Main event matches: 12
• Best month: December – 2.75 matches per week, 7.25 women wrestling per week
• Worst month: July – 1.2 matches per week, 3.6 women wrestling per week

NXT has been the gold standard in 2022 for putting women’s matches on TV. They punctuated the last week of April by getting three women’s matches and a mixed tag team match on TV in two hours, the seventh time they’ve gotten three matches in on an episode. They even ran the Women’s Dusty Cup tournament on television without displacing the regular slate of women’s matches. They’ve juggled over 20 women on their active roster without anyone being off so long that you think they’re in witness protection, something you can’t say for RAW or Smackdown. In the last week of April they featured ten women in the ring and another 14 in vignettes, promos, etc which has got to be some kind of record. And even when they’ve cooked up some gimmick like the Dusty Cup or the Breakout Tournament, they don’t put those matches in place of the regularly scheduled women’s matches, they use them to augment them. For the year they’ve gotten 3 or more matches on TV in eighteen different episodes, a ridiculous amount given that they only have two hours to work with. And they’ve had women main event 10 different times by my count so far, which puts them right there with RAW and ahead of everyone else.

There’s really nothing to complain about here at all in terms of how much the women get to wrestle. Hell, they’ve even figured out how to lay out the shorter matches so that they make sense and don’t end abruptly the way that they do so often on RAW and Smackdown. I didn’t expect them to keep up the pace they ran at when they were doing the Dusty Cup and Breakout tournament, but they managed to get two matches in almost every week since and a third some other weeks. Keeping that up without the gimmick tournaments going on to give you extra matches to slot in is a huge deal. And last but certainly not least they used the entire roster in all kinds of feuds and storylines from title feuds to personal beefs to silly stuff. Every two hour wrestling show should be taking notes and doing the same. And the one three hour show should figure out how to do this kind of thing. themselves.

Overall grade: A

How to improve: Well there is the matter that Athena (formerly Ember Moon) brought up, that the stylistic/wardrobe changes that recently took place were strongly suggested and not just chosen by the women themselves. That’s got nothing to do with how many matches they book every week but it’s worth noting. Outside of that, this is about as good as you can expect anyone to book women’s matches on television. They do have more matches that are under four minutes than anyone, but given that this is developmental and there’s a lot of very green talent that’s to be expected. But overall it’s been so well done that I fully expect some type of regression next year because there’s no way they can keep this up.

Dynamite (Results final)

• Total matches: 53, down from last year’s 56
• Matches per week: 1.02, down from 1.08 for 2021
• Matches under four minutes: 7
• Women with over 10 matches: 3
• Women wrestling per week: 2.69, up from 2.4 last year
• Main event matches: 3
• Best months: October and December – 1 match per week, 3.5 women wrestling per week
• Worst month: April and May – 1 match per week, 2 women wrestling per week

Same sh-, different year. One match, two women, rinse and repeat. I can type ‘one match, two women’ every Monday and rarely have to change it (15 times this year, and only once for number of matches), that’s how predictable they are. Then there’s the matter of how frequently each woman gets to wrestle, a holdover from 2021. Of the 31 women I counted as having wrestled on Dynamite this year, over a fourth (8) have only worked one match. That’s the worst ratio for any of the five shows I’m tracking here. It took until August 24 for any one woman to get up to 10 matches worked for the year on the show, and by year’s end that number was up to 3. As with last year the only saving grace is that the one match they do have usually gets somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes, sparing you from the barrage of rushed 2 to 3 minute matches that happen on RAW and Smackdown. But beyond that, forget it. Even when they come up with something like the TBS Title tournament or the Women’s Owen Hart tournament those matches simply take the place of the regular women’s match that week. But unlike RAW and Smackdown during even their worst periods they haven’t thrown us any bones like the gauntlet match or the six pack challenges. No, if you want to see more than two women wrestle you have to hope for the occasional tag team match.

Overall grade: F. The big differences between Smackdown and Dynamite is that Smackdown does use multiple women in spots every week even if they’re not getting in the ring, and that Smackdown books short matches for the men, too, thus lessening the gender disparity a bit. They also put their Women’s champion on TV frequently enough that you don’t forget who she is, sometimes even for 10 minutes in one episode and not 10 minutes combined over several weeks. If Smackdown is disappointing then Dynamite is an outright failure. And since HHH took over they’ve pulled far enough ahead that Dynamite is in the mud all by itself.

How to improve: Same as last year; add a second match week more than once or twice a year. Give your women’s champion more TV time than the woman she beat, and at least as much time as your secondary women’s champion. If you’re going to do a tournament, don’t use it to replace your regular women’s matches on TV.

Impact (results final)

• Total matches: 78, up from 63 in 2021
• Matches per week: 1.56, up from 1.26 for last year
• Matches under four minutes: 28
• Women with over 10 matches: 9
• Women wrestling per week: 4.24, up from 3.9 last year
• Main event matches: 9, up from 2 last year
• Best month: January – 2 matches per week, 5.25 women wrestling per week
• Worst month: September – 1.2 matches per week, 2.8 women wrestling per week

Impact started out hot, with two or three matches in 8 out of the first 9 weeks and a title match in week 2. On the pay per view front they capitalized on Mickie James getting the invite for the Royal Rumble by booking her in the main event of their first pay per view of the year, Hard to Kill. They were rolling along pretty well through April 7 and then the wheels fell off in the worst way. There were only 4 matches over the next 5 weeks, a spiral that went on until the ship got somewhat righted on May 19 but never got back to where it was in the first quarter, and then they’d go in the crapper again in November and December to the tune of 1.1 matches for 2.85 women per week, including a goose egg for December 15th. While they remain well ahead of last year’s pace those three months are a real ‘what if?’; had they not fallen off those cliffs so bad they might be ahead of RAW for second place instead of stuck firmly in a close third. All that being said, 2022 was a huge improvement over 2021. They had way more TV main events than last year – nine as opposed to two, and went up in every other category. In terms of efficiency give the TV time they have to work with they were second to NXT for the year. And they did this despite losing a lot of their roster in the second half of the year – Mia Yim, Lady Frost, Tenille Dashwood, the Influence, Madison Rayne, and Chelsea Green all moved on at different times. Replenishing the roster, a task made more difficult now that WWE is back in signing mode, is going to be the major determining factor in how they do in 2023. If they do it then there’s no reason they can’t keep the train rolling here.

Final grade: B-. In March I’d have given them a B+, maybe an A-. But they went on a terrible downward spiral in April through June and never fully reversed it. Then they closed things out in November and December with a relative whimper. Their best stuff was on par with anyone else’s but they crapped the bed for almost half the year and that can’t be ignored. Overall a major improvement from 2021, but the inconsistency leaves them with the same grade as 2021.

How to improve:  Look at January through mid-April, and August through October, then try to do that for the whole year.

Conclusions

2022 has been a year of schizophrenic stagnation across the board. On it’s two main brands WWE continues to be hit and miss outside of the title feuds; a few brief flourishes of fuller inclusion do not make up for the stretches where half the roster is getting booked like they’re about to get released. Raw was plodding through April, picked up nicely for a bit, and then regressed. Smackdown started doing better under HHH, but for the year still looks like 2020 and 2021. Impact was neck and neck with NXT until Spring, fell back significantly in April, and then rebounded later to almost keep up with RAW before tailing off again in November and December. AEW continued to highlight Britt Baker and Jade Cargill, and their faction mates, while the other women have a hard time getting on Dynamite for more than two weeks in a row. Toni Storm finally started to get some traction as champion late in the year but Thunderrosa’s title reign was largely treated as a sideshow to Baker like Hikaru Shida before her. Hayter is getting on TV more as champion to end the year but I’m sure being Baker’s faction mate has a lot to do with that.

That leaves NXT 2.0 as the one place that has consistently managed it’s entire roster well and books enough matches to get everyone on at least once or twice a month. That they had way more matches in a year than 3 hour RAW is both great for them and an indictment of how the main roster is handled in WWE. Smackdown has been an absolute wasteland outside of the women’s title feud most of the year; March through mid-May was looking up with the Women’s tag team title program but once Naomi and Sasha left and Charlotte took some time off, it was mostly bad with scattershot booking papered over by the occasional six pack challenge or six woman tag match until HHH took over and started booking tag matches and multi-woman matches. In short, the WWE main roster has been basically feast or famine this year and for the first time in a while it was not crazy to say that the women’s divisions outside of WWE were being presented as well, and sometimes better, than on RAW and Smackdown. And to wit for maybe the first ever AEW had the best women’s match on weekly TV duirng the week of December 22nd when Hayter and Shida main evented Dynamite and put on one of the best TV matches you’ll see anywhere this year.

So in short – NXT and Impact are up a lot, Smackdown and Dynamite are close to where they were last year, and RAW has fallen back a good bit. That’s the state of things in 2022 right now as far as women’s wrestling on TV. Let’s see where it goes from here.