Welp, judging by the reviews this year’s Survivor Series was not one for the history books. Was it bad? I don’t think so. Go back to the lean years of the mid 90s or pre-Brand Split 2010s if you want to see bad shows, and there are plenty of editions that are only remembered for one moment in time like when the Shield debuted in 2012 or the Undertaker winning the World Title in 1991. But for me the biggest sin was not in the quality of any of the matches or the lack of anything earth shattering, it was in how the show was formatted. I feel like we’re at a crossroads moment with the Wargames matches, and that this card had too few matches, especially considering that people are being asked to pay a lot more to see them than they were just four months ago. So I came with a few ideas that I think would help make things better and at least make us feel a little better about the whole thing. Here they are.
One more match
The previous Survivor Series Wargames PLEs had five matches on them; this one only had four. I know we are in the fewer matches per show TKO era, but the line has got to be drawn somewhere. Five match PLEs and special events have been pretty commonplace for decades; if you can’t find a way to get one more match onto a three hour show (which you already do several other times a year anyway) then that’s a real problem. And it’s not like there weren’t some easy options for a fifth match this year. There was a traditional 5 on 5 Survivor Series elimination that was on Smackdown the night before! There are two men’s tag team titles and two women’s midcard titles whose holders were free that night, one of which could have been defended on the show.
I’m not calling for a return of the 10 match, 4 plus hour PLEs that we got in 2017 and 2019 here just one more match! And it’s not like they can’t fit it in. Night of Champions had six matches this year. Clash in Paris also had six matches, and 4 of them went over 20 minutes! Almost every other second tier PLE had 5 matches this year. You’re telling me that Chelsea Green, who has been outstanding but not been on any PLEs other than the Royal Rumble and Evolution this year, couldn’t get a six minute match on this show? Or that AJ Styles and Dragon Lee couldn’t defend their titles in an 8 minute match? Or that the aforementioned elimination match couldn’t have found it’s way onto the PLE? Now if you’re insistent on making things fit some time frame for this show, that’s easy…
Shorten the Wargames matches
Every year they’ve done it on the main roster both the Men’s and Women’s Wargames matches have gone well over 30 minutes long; this year they both went over 40 minutes apiece while the shortest year was 2023 when they went 34 and 33 minutes, respectively. Now that’s not as long as the NXT version where in 2019 the men went 47 minutes (yikes), but it’s still much longer than the match was originally intended. The pioneering NWA version from 1987 to 1992 always fell somewhere between 21 and 24 minutes, and the Fall Brawl WCW version which ran from 1993 to 1998 and only had 4 men on each team would clock in at under 20 minutes.
Now you don’t have to shrink it all the way down to 20 minutes, but would 25 be so bad? It takes 19 minutes to get all 10 people in, 15 minutes when you only have 4 on each team. There’s no reason the final segment of a match where everyone has beating the crap out of each other in a cage needs to carry on for almost another 20 minutes. The only reason for it to go that long is to set up a bunch of contrived spots and do some character lore between the people in the ring. I maintain that you can get some of that stuff in earlier in the match, especially the character stuff and any spots that don’t need all 10 people involved. Shaving 15 minutes off of each match opens a whole 30 minutes of ring time to slide in the traditional elimination match that ran on Smackdown the night before which only took up 20 minutes.
Wargames aren’t the only place where this is true, by the way. This year I’ve seen many complaints about losing matches on PLE cards to commercials; while they are present far more than they have every been on WWE PLEs they are not the culprit that they are made out to be. In actuality there’s a lot of time eaten up by matches that just go way too long. This year the shorter tier PLEs had a combined 17 matches that went over 20 minutes. Ten of those went over 25 minutes, and 2 were over 30. Are you telling that none of those matches could have shaved off 5 or 10 minutes so that Elimination Chamber or Survivor Series could get up to 5 matches, or that Crown Jewel or WrestlePalooza or Backlash or Money in the Bank couldn’t get up to 6? Please, just stop it.
Cycle through the formats
Survivor Series has existed in four different structures: Dominated by elimination matches, a more conventional card with one or two elimination matches, the brand vs. brand competition and the current Wargames themed format. And outside of the second option they all were hard to maintain after a few years. The initial elimination match heavy format lasted five years, as did the brand supremacy one. Wargames is now four years in, and the women’s side has already fallen into the habit of slapping things together to meet the deadline of having the match on the calendar. So in my opinion it would be a good time to revert to one of the other types. With the roster the size it is now there’s no reason you can’t do the elimination match heavy format from the late 80s/early 90s again so why not go there for a few years?
And there you have it. Those are three things that I think would make the show better and are within the realm of possibility of actually happening. I didn’t think 2025’s show was as bad as a lot of you did but I also wouldn’t put it on the list of shows to rewatch be it for this year or Survivor Series shows on their own. It was fine and I was sports entertained, but it could have been better. Some of that was the matches themselves, but sometimes you just don’t get five star matches. And you can’t have the Undertaker debut or a Montreal Screwjob every November.
That doesn’t mean that the show as a whole can’t add up to more than the sum total of it’s match grades. What I’m proposing here is a way to do just that by fixing some things that would make everyone feel better about what they’re watching. We’ll see if they listen.
Stroke of Genius 