WWE Saturday Night's Main Event 12/14/2024: 3 Things We Hated And 3 Things We Loved

Welcome to Wrestling Inc.'s inaugural review of WWE Saturday Night's Main Event, the rare show that saw a new champion crowned, but during which no championship changed hands. Similarly rare are WINC opinion columns that skip almost the entirety of the undercard and either focus exclusively on the main event or widen their perspectives to examine the broadcast as a whole, but that's what we have for you this time around — and if that wasn't enough, the post-show shenanigans involving Cody Rhodes getting package piledriven and Kevin Owens get into a shoving match with Triple H have us all up in our feelings about major angles dropping on social media. In other words, we have a lot of big thoughts to share with you — though we will at least devote some time to Chelsea Green's United States title win, as well as Jesse Ventura ... just being Jesse Ventura.

Remember, if all you want is show results, skip over to our Saturday Night's Main Event results page for all the objective facts you could possibly ask for. If you're looking for some subjective thoughts, opinions, and analysis of what we all watched, this is the place to be. Here are three things we hated and three things we loved about the 12/14/24 return of WWE Saturday Night's Main Event.

Chelsea Green must have had a lot of confidence when she walked into her Women's United States Championship match, her face proudly plastered over her all-white gear. Her confidence, as it turns out, was well-founded, as Green and Michin completely stole the show at Saturday Night's Main Event in their match for the Women's United States Championship.

Obviously, the big kicker is there: Green is the inaugural Women's United States Champion, and is, for many, the "correct" booking decision. While I will say that Michin put up a great fight and would've (or would be, if we're looking prospectively) been a great United States Champion, I can't ignore just how good at the game Green is. Ever since she returned to WWE in the 2023 Royal Rumble, she has been a stand-out star on whatever show she's on with her constant comedic antics. Green has also shown that she is more than willing to put her body through some extreme circumstances for the love of the game — her spot resume is impressive, with an insane ladder fall at Money in the Bank 2024 and an exciting Dumpster match headlining the proverbial document. She has done this all without a singles title on her waist or a singles title prospect in her immediate future. Many consider Green to be the "correct" booking decision, and for good reason — she has proven that she can provide great entertainment, both light-hearted and serious, with no ego and an open mind.

The journey is just as important, if not even more so, than the destination itself. That's an adage, sure, but it was more than true in this match. As exciting as Green's win is, I wouldn't be writing about it here if the match for the title wasn't just as satisfying. Green and Michin's experience with each other on the independent scene shone in the beginning, where Green and Michin were instantly comfortable with each other, allowing for Michin to sell well and bring an air of legitimacy to Green's typically comedic character. Sure, there were some clumsy spots here and there, but honestly, the two women performed better than they have in other recent matches. The chemistry between them was just there, and it made such a special and historic match even better. To top it all off, the finish was innovative and just up Green's ally. Like, a counter flip from the top rope into a successful Un-Pretty-Her? It is so creative, the spot alone would have put this match over some of the others ones seen on the card.

Green and Michin have completely justified their place as inaugural Women's United States Championship tournament finalists. For being sandwiched between a hard-hitting match for the World Heavyweight Championship and the main event, they stood their ground, and Green's thrill at finally winning her first singles title in WWE was glorious. Michin put up a spectacular fight, but for now, all of our comically large hats will be off to Chelsea Green.

Written by Angeline Phu

While I really enjoyed this Saturday Night's Main Event, I thought a lot of the finishes in the matches, outside of the Women's United States Championship match, were pretty uninspired. I thought that about Undisputed WWE Champion Cody Rhodes' victory over "The Prize Fighter" Kevin Owens, and my hatred for this ending got stronger when I took to social media to see all the craziness that happened after the match. I get that WWE is still playing off the "fan footage" that started this entire feud when Owens took out Rhodes by his bus, and it was only caught by a fan's phone, but when it's in front of an entire live crowd, it doesn't have the same effect.

But, first things first before all the post-broadcast shenanigans, I absolutely expected Rhodes to win, especially since he was wearing the winged eagle championship and WWE would want to send the fans home happy on the first revamped edition of SNME. That I didn't have a problem with, as of course, I am a huge fan of Rhodes. However, I didn't enjoy the multiple referee bumps during the match and thought that could have been a bit cleaner. The ending also sucked because Rhodes took more of the steel chair in the ring than Owens when the champion hit the Cross Rhodes. The camera was at just the right angle and the chair must have not been positioned correctly or whatever, but it just didn't look great.

I thought that would be my main issue which, honestly, it was kind of a nitpick to begin with. This was a good little special for the month where there are no main roster premium live events. However, as I mentioned, the post-broadcast extra curricular activities were something I thought all fans should have seen. Taking out Rhodes with the banned piledriver, after Orton was put on the shelf with the same move, attempting to take the beloved winged eagle hostage, and then even more of note, getting physical with Triple H who's not meant to get in the ring ever again, was something I certainly would have liked to see from a broadcast perspective rather than fan footage on X. The entire thing was a great storyline angle, that I'm sure was filmed and ready to be played for fans on "SmackDown," and everyone's going to be talking about it for a week, but it just sucks to not have seen it. Maybe it's my own fear of missing out, but I don't think this was a great move from WWE. I mean, I'm interested, but I'm more so annoyed that I didn't get to see it myself as it happened. I went home happy with Rhodes' win, but I have major FOMO on all the crazy things that transpired after the show went off the air.

Written by Daisy Ruth

I want to thank Jesse "The Body" Ventura for his contributions to commentary on Saturday night, but it's more important that I thank whoever told Ventura that there would be some kind — any kind — of focus on Cody Rhodes's ankle, kayfabe injured on last week's "SmackDown." Ventura went into the main event of Saturday Night's Main Event expecting a masterclass in limb-work, and instead was met with the usual athletic display from Rhodes, and the WWE Hall of Famer did not keep his distaste quiet. Ventura spent much of the match yelling at the ornery Kevin Owens to attack Rhodes's wounded leg, and when he wasn't complaining about the lack of legwork from Owens, he was criticizing Rhodes for playing to the crowd, instead of covering his opponent.

"Feed off the audience all you want but win the damn match," Ventura shouted in the line of the night, and it's hard not to agree with his logic. His anger at both men's lack of seriousness helped imbue a certain reality to the show. The match was as serious as anything to Ventura and it made the whole proceedings feel that much more important, that much more real.

I was one of the few on staff who really liked the closing match between Rhodes and Owens, but the entire staff was in agreement that Ventura's loud protestations of the current wrestling product were the highlight of the match. Ventura has not been on commentary for WWE in decades, and after his display on Saturday, I think the company would benefit from bringing him back as much as possible.

Written by Ross Berman

f you hadn't told me that Saturday's show was the revival of the historic Saturday Night's Main Event, I would've assumed someone brought in a camera to film a glorified house show to post online.

With the amount of advertising WWE did for what was christened an "NBC Special," the Long Island-based event was practically perceived a premium live event. The card was stacked with four championship fights and only WWE's top-line Superstars. They brought Hall of Famers and industry icons in, and they even had the referees wearing adorable throwback uniforms! The Nassau Coliseum was filled to the absolute brim with Long Island locals and traveling wrestling fans, and the energy was high for what many would assume to be a groundbreaking event, full of developments and twists that set the tone for the rest of WWE's year.

Imagine our disappointment when ... nothing of note happened at this show. Seriously. You might be able to find more developments on any first-hour-free episode of "WWE Raw" and "WWE SmackDown" than Saturday Night's Main Event. Besides the Women's United States Championship match and Kevin Owen's post-match crash out, there were no real developments in the storylines or title challenger scenes in Saturday Night's Main Event two-hour run time. Rhea Ripley appeared after Liv Morgan's match, but did nothing. GUNTHER bested both Damian Priest and Finn Balor for the world title, but not one contender showed up afterwards. No "Viper" showed up during or after the main event, despite all the allusions to Randy Orton's mannerisms. It's one thing for all the champions to retain in a premium live event that isn't WrestleMania, SummerSlam, or the occasional international show. It's another thing to have no new challengers, no in-ring returns, or no betrayals that make the show worth watching.

If this was just a glorified version of the competition's Saturday show, then I'd kind of understand why WWE showed such restraint in their booking. The matches were great, sure, but if this is a minor show, then it makes sense that no developments were made, from storylines to title contenders. However, this was advertised to be a big event — how often had we sat through yet another ad for Saturday Night's Main Event ever since the concluding fireworks of Survivor Series 2024? To promote this event this heavily, from the iconic venue to the promotional T-shirts to the stacked card, and deliver a show that, in the narrative long run, means nothing feels disappointing at best and deceptive at worst. Even the competition's Saturday show has title changes and storyline progression, and that's such a C-tier show that we don't even write opinion columns for it. What's WWE's excuse?

People showed up and made time to watch this "NBC Special" under the assumption that it was a can't-miss affair. Unfortunately, WWE booking set a horrible precedent with this event: that future episodes of Saturday Night's Main Event can be missed.

Written by Angeline Phu

Saturday Night's Main Event was arguably let down by the fact that it did little to change the course of WWE programming, with just the one champion crowned to inaugurate the Women's United States Championship. But I would counter that it was in this simplicity that the show thrived for what it was: a simple night of wrestling on a Saturday.

The show started with the grudge match between Drew McIntyre and Sami Zayn, a node in the story of McIntyre's vengeance against The Original Bloodline. It was routinely excellent as one would expect from those in the ring, and told a simple and effective story of McIntyre out-witting his opponent, retreating from the ring so that Zayn gave chase only to return to the ring (and thus, the high ground) to use his opponent's momentum against him for the Claymore. That in itself set the tone for the show in its entirety, relying on logical conclusions to contests rather than convoluted overbooking designed simply to subvert expectations for the sake of it. Liv Morgan retained her title over Iyo Sky with a reversal into ObLivion, Gunther simply out-wrestled Finn Balor and Damian Priest to retain his own title, and Chelsea Green made use of a sunset flip from the top rope to land her finisher to be crowned US Champion.

In fact, the only match that saw some shenanigans at play was the main event — where it would have been called for owing to the animosity in this feud — between Kevin Owens and Cody Rhodes. The pair wrestled once again a very good match — a given yet again when you consider who it was in the ring — pushing the boundaries of what they could within a standard rules bout. That was until the referee took a bump and Owens got the visual pinfall with no official count. He then introduced a steel chair that would prove to be his undoing, and while many (myself included) would have loved to see Owens take the title there is a strong chance this plays into the feud for a better pay-off. There wasn't much in the way of title changes and swift changes in creative direction, but SNME did well to further the narrative of several characters across the two brands, and made for an enjoyably simple wrestling experience. What more could you really ask for?

Written by Max Everett

Five-match PLE cards have become the norm under Triple H's creative regime, which has led to some vocal (and justified) complaints about how those five matches tend to be spaced out over the course of three hours, with interminably long entrances and gaudy commercial segments filling the time between. At Saturday Night's Main Event, we got a glimpse of the opposite — what happens when WWE tries to squeeze five matches into two hours (with commercials) — and the results, while interesting, were unfortunately still not great.

To their credit, WWE did manage to squeeze in all five matches, and there was a much faster pace to the overall feel of the show, with very little time between contests and brief, old-school entrances to match the classic SNME tone. But even with nearly all the fat trimmed, it didn't feel like there was enough time. The first two matches flew by, and while I personally appreciated those matches ending the moment somebody hit a finisher, they still felt abrupt — the right finishes, but coming a little too soon. The next two matches felt about right, length-wise — as opposed to the first two, which were a singles match between borderline main-eventers and a singles world title match, the third and fourth bouts were a triple threat world title match and a singles midcard title match, which is probably why they were better suited to the 8-11 minute range all four contests fell into. But the main event just barely got 12 — less than half of the 26 minutes Cody Rhodes and Kevin Owens got at Bash in Berlin — and then they had to book it off the air and release the subsequent post-match attack on Rhodes, and the confrontation between Owens and Triple H, as videos on social media. I get that they're going for a certain air of authenticity with this stuff in terms of presenting Owens' attacks as outside the normal production of the wrestling shows, and it's fine as an occasional thing, but doing it consistently screws with the rhythms of the entire viewing experience. Big angles — like somebody hitting a move they haven't used in 10 years, the world champion being stretchered out of the arena, and a wrestler having a confrontation with both on-screen and real life authority figure Triple H, for example — are generally expected to close shows, and that expectation is part of the narrative structure that allows us to buy into set-ups under the presumption that our faith will be rewarded with pay-offs. That is just fundamentally How This Works. Over-stuffing a two-hour time slot and throwing whatever happens after 10pm Eastern on social media doesn't make the product feel gritty and realistic, it makes it seem like you did a bad job of planning and ran out of time.

Particularly with Netflix coming up, I am begging Paul Levesque to remember that there is such thing as a 2.5-hour show, and that almost every 2.5-hour NXT Takeover was (a) five matches long, and (b) awesome. You don't seem to know how to adjust your sense of pacing to any other length of time, so maybe just stick to what you do know? Because so far the alternatives haven't been working out — in either direction.

Written by Miles Schneiderman