Potential New Storylines After Chris Jericho and Kane Return at WWE Night of Champions

WWE Night of Champions featured the shocking returns of Chris Jericho and Kane, John Cena winning the United States title and Seth Rollins defeating Sting to retain his WWE World Heavyweight Championship, highlighting a memorable pay-per-view in Houston Texas.

Can these buzzworthy happenings that took place at WWE Night of Champions help the WWE reverse course on its ratings plunge? Because they better do just that.

After all, SmackDown’s viewership numbers are down considerably despite moving from Friday, one of the worst TV viewing nights of the week, to Thursday. And according to Prowrestling.net, the rating for last week’s episode of Monday Night Raw was down from the previous week yet again, even though the prior Raw landed on Labor Day:


Monday’s WWE Raw scored a 2.42 rating, down from the 2.44 rating the show drew last week. Raw averaged 3.397 million viewers, up from the 3.385 million average from last week.
Monday Night Football drew an average of 14.3 million viewers for ESPN . The September 8, 2014 Raw delivered a 2.81 rating with 3.920 million viewers for the show opposed by ESPN’s annual Monday Night Football doubleheader.

It’s certainly not an encouraging sign that ratings have dropped so much over the past year, but coming off of a strong and certainly newsworthy Night of Champions pay-per-view, the WWE has a chance to combat the monster that is Monday Night Football. But it’ll take a mix of interesting angles, quality storyline development of those angles and something, anything, that will generate more interest in Raw than there has been recently.

After the surprise returns of Jericho and Kane and John Cena’s big title win, the WWE has an opportunity to deliver in all three of those areas in its attempt to move the needle and turn this drawn-out ratings slump around. Let’s examine the biggest (new) storylines coming out of the PPV, and rank them according to just one criteria: Which storyline will generate the most fan interest and help the WWE’s television ratings rebound?

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