NIGHT ONE
THE GOOD
Jey vs Gunther
Good opener, had much more of an old school NWA match kind of feel to me. Which was a good thing. The big knock on Jey Uso’s ring work is that he spams a handful of moves all the time. This match moving like it did pretty much eliminated that as an issue. Jey is way better than the IWC gives him credit for. The belt shot from Gunther was excellently done. I thought this was a very good match, and was a great moment for Jey Uso. Gunther getting caught in a submission and then tapping out quick has become a part of his character and chink in his armor. Jey got the win and the big moment he’s earned, not deserved. Ever since he had to square up mano y mano with Roman back in 2020 Jey has risen to the occasion, proven himself over and over, and got over in the most organic way possible. Kudos to both men.
The Main Event
From Living Colour returning to play CM Punk to the ring to the match itself to all the Roman Reigns-esque drama that we’ve come to know and love for the past five years this one delivered. As lackluster or even bad that a lot of Roman’s early WrestleMania main events were, the last four have been great. Seth Rollins continued his case for being the modern day Mr. WrestleMania and Punk gave his second best performance since returning. Great way to close the night and the show.
Jade Cargill vs Naomi
Naomi’s character change has been phenomenal and the build up to this match was great. I thought the match itself was good and very well laid out. It was better than any of the singles matches I saw Jade have in AEW for sure, and you can thank Naomi for that. Jade has still got a ways to go but I think she has moved up from a person you had to almost hide in matches to someone who can execute the spots well once they’re laid out. I thought there was way more road left to travel with this thing but having Jade just win it clean in nine minutes sure deflates that idea. It looks like HHH was focused on just getting Jade a Mania win and not what could have been a big feud for the year.
THE BAD
TV Level matches
There were a few matches that could have really been kept on RAW or Smackdown, starting off with the tag team title match. The tag division on RAW has talent but nobody has been made to feel like a big deal and everybody loses too much, which leads to matches like this feeling totally unimportant even though the result was a historic title win for the New Day. The same can be said for El Grande Americano vs Rey Fenix. I gotta admit I popped for the El Grande Americano entrance, but it only went seven minutes and having Fenix lose his PLE debut is a weird choice. And this may sound controversial but I felt the same way about the US Title match. On paper it absolutely was a WrestleMania match, and it was a very good match, both guys looked great in there. I’ve been watching Jacob Fatu since 2019 in MLW, I’m happy to see him get a big win on this stage, but the length (10 and a half minutes) made it feel like a TV main event and not a WrestleMania match.
THE DISHEVELED
Charlotte Flair vs Tiffany Stratton
I wasn’t expecting a five star match given that they’ve never wrestled each other and that Charlotte is coming off 14 months of inactivity due to her knee injury. It had it’s moments and was good in a few places. But Tiffany was not good here at all; she froze up like a deer in headlights, got blown up early and was lost several times throughout and had to be led through every point in the match as if she was a total rookie. She’s being called the next in the line of succession at the top, so that’s how she should be judged and she did not pass the test here. Go look at Charlotte and Bianca Belair’s matches at the same points in their careers and then look at how Tiffany did here then you tell me if she belongs in that same class. She may get there, but she ain’t there now for real.
Overall Verdict
Night one opened well then started alternating between good, messy, and uninteresting then finished strong with the main event. It was definitely the worst of the night ones in my opinion outside of the weird 2020 WrestleMania at the PC.
NIGHT TWO
THE GOOD
Everyone expected the opener to deliver despite the convoluted storyline, and it did. Bianca, Rhea, and Iyo did great and it was a great match. Iyo won as I expected. I didn’t like Bianca getting booed for no reason; she didn’t do anything wrong during this whole feud. This match was very much needed because since WrestleMania 40 the quality of women’s PPV matches has fell off a bit and was surpassed by both AEW and TNA. Hopefully this is a step in the right direction and not just a blip on the radar. But this was the first WWE main roster women’s match I’d put on a Match of the Year list since Bayley and Iyo at Mania 40; it was that good.
Then Drew McIntyre and Damien Priest came out determined to match it, and almost did. They beat the hell of each other real good and did some really sick looking stuff. And not to be outdone the 4 way match for the IC title was a very good one. The first half of the card was really good, and had everything on a roll. And finally, Joe Hendry coming out to face Randy Orton was a good way to make something out Kevin Owens’ neck injury. Yes people are gonna quibble about the TNA champion losing in 3 minutes but taking an RKO looks like it’s going to be the new stone cold stunner in that guys who work in the business are going to love the chance to take one. It’s a hell of a ride Joe has been on for the last two years.
THE BAD
AJ Styles and Logan Paul actually quieted the crowd. It was in an unfortunate position and probably would have went over better had it been swapped with one the night one matches. It wasn’t bad, although it felt longer than the 17:50 that it went, but the crowd sounded as if they were picking that time to take a break and that brought down the vibe. Like a lot of this card it suffered from a lackluster build (more on that later).
The women’s tag team title match was just a fiasco. Slapping together Bayley and Lyra Valkyria as a team was a weird move but at least the time was put in on TV to give it some substance. But to then swap Bayley out the day before to slide in Becky Lynch AND have her and Lyra win is just awful. Bayley deserves better than that and quite frankly should have said ‘not gonna work for me, brother’ to that whole thing. There were plenty of other ways to bring Becky back and team her with Lyra without dragging Bayley into an angle where she was on then off of the biggest show of the year. It also once again makes a mockery out of the women’s tag team titles as I don’t expect Becky and Lyra to have them very long.
The finish of the main event was pretty bad. The ref bump was fine. Travis Scott coming out and doing one of the worst booked run ins ever was just yikes. Cody fighting through it all was doing too much. And no Rock appearance sealed it. After participating in the biggest heel turn since 2020, the Rock was a ghost ever since March 1. Cena and Cody did fine setting things up on TV, but the Rock coming out to seal Cody’s fate was needed here. Instead we got an extended run in from Travis Scott and a ‘man, I guess’ ending. The match itself was going well up to that point in my opinion but you gotta stick the landing.
OVERALL VERDICT
This was a very hit and miss weekend, easily one of the worst two night Manias. Night one was up and down, night two started up and then nosedived. And then you had the tone deaf ‘we really don’t know our audience, do we?’ shout outs to Dana White and Tony Hinchcliffe, and the ridiculous ads and product placement throughout both nights. Like much of WWE television this year it felt like half the show content was was an ad on top of the million commercial breaks during the show. The NFL is a 3 hour commercial every week but they manage to do it in a way that it doesn’t feel like the on field action doesn’t matter. WWE does not. Was it the worst WrestleMania ever? Of course not. But we’re coming off a 4 year run that was like no other from 37 through 40 so yes, an ok show is going to look like crap. AND this was just an ok show in totality.
I blame a lot of that on the build for most of the matches. Much has been said about the road to WrestleMania feeling lackluster this year (I even said some myself here, and I think now that the naysayers were right. Some builds were plagued by part timers absences or spotty schedules be it Logan Paul or the Rock or Cena. Owens being injured took away what would have been a barnburner with him and Orton. Some were just done in the most low energy, sideshow fashion like the RAW tag team title match. And then there was the convoluted nonsense like what led to the women’s triple threat match.
It’s been said a lot over the years that WWE puts the wrestling second to literally everything else. The pushback to that is that they put story over all else and that is what matters more, but this time most of the stories weren’t that great going in either. Going from the Bloodline Saga of the past several years to what really looks like a slapped together heel turn being carried by the talent is a huge part of it. Sometimes the matches overcame that but sometimes they didn’t. This show, while not bad, felt like instead of booking a wrestling show and selling the matches everyone in charge was more preoccupied with booking celebrities and sponsorships and selling gaudy merchandise like this:
There’s also a different vibe spreading over the whole place. The whole atmosphere in 2025 has gotten very UFC-coded from who was shouted out onscreen to some of the quotes from HHH, Reigns, and Cena in the week leading up to it to proliferation of sponsorship placements. While Nick Khan has made it clear that there’s little overlap between the UFC and WWE audiences (13 percent), WWE this year has felt to me like they have been hard selling to the UFC audience more than the people who got them there, right down to where the show was located, the price tag for everything, you name it. This year has often felt like watching one big display of self satisfaction, a grotesque victory lap of sorts. You could call this MAGA-Mania for real.
I’d put this in the middle of the pack as far as Manias go. It’s not as bad as the true stinkers like 9, 11, or 15. But it’s a far cry from any of the truly great ones and a big step down from the last two years. No, it’s more like 32 or 34 in that it had some gems of matches but also some ‘who booked this s-?’ stuff and some things that would leave a bad taste in a lot of mouths. I give it a C+. What happens next is crucial; if the storytelling does not pick up where it has lagged then this could be a long year.
Stroke of Genius 