Welcome to Wrestling Inc.’s weekly review of “WWE SmackDown,” the show that added a big stipulation to a Saturday Night’s Main Event match and saw two women advance to an interim women’s title ladder match at SummerSlam. If you were wondering whether the Wrestling Inc. staff has thoughts on all these subjects and more, wonder no further — we do!
Of course, even with “SmackDown” running on just a two-hour runtime, we can’t cover the entire show here in this column, which is why we stick to giving our opinions about the matches and segments that stood out the most (Finn Balor vs. Talla Tonga, for example, didn’t make the cut this week). If you want complete coverage, especially if you missed the show entirely, check out our “WWE SmackDown” 7/17/26 results page. If you want to know what the WINC crew thought of Friday’s offering, this is the place to be. Here are three things we hated and three things we loved about the 7/17/26 episode of “WWE Smackdown!”
Hated: Women’s US Champion Tiffany Stratton advances over Jacy Jayne
I already don’t love that WWE is deciding to crown an interim WWE Women’s Champion, when it sounds like Rhea Ripley could be back very soon after SummerSlam (and I hope she is healthy and returns sooner rather than later, don’t get me wrong), but the booking choices around the ladder match to crown that interim champ are even worse. Tonight’s decision to put Women’s United States Champion Tiffany Stratton over Jacy Jayne was a terrible one for a few reasons.
First, WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions Brie Bella and Paige took out Fatal Influence’s Lainey Reid and Fallon Henley ahead of the match, brawling with them to the back, evening the odds for Stratton. While that does make sense, as the two teams have a match for the titles tomorrow at Saturday Night’s Main Event, and you’d think Jayne would be able to handle herself against one woman in Stratton, that wasn’t the case.
Thankfully, Stratton didn’t pin Jayne immediately off the distraction after her stablemates were attacked, but she did get a clean victory over her. Stratton dodged Jayne’s Rolling Encore, hit a rolling senton to set her up for the Prettiest Moonsault Ever, and connected with the move to qualify for the ladder match at “The Biggest Party of the Summer.”
Yes, Stratton should absolutely be on the SummerSlam card, as it’s in her home state of Minnesota. But, she has her own championship and shouldn’t be competing for another one with so many other women on “SmackDown” who aren’t being used. I can’t think of one title in recent memory that WWE has cared less about than the Women’s United States Championship. Stratton should be defending the gold in her own singles match to highlight her abilities and get someone else on the show.
It also looked like Jayne was being set up to be a hot challenger for the gold after Fatal Influence’s debut to a massive amount of heat on the main roster after WrestleMania. If I had the pen, I would have booked her to win the interim championship, setting her up for a feud with Ripley whenever she gets back. With the pre-recorded promos hyping up all the competitors in the qualifying matches tonight, it looks as though the ladder match wasn’t a last-moment decision by WWE, and it could have been much, much better thought out.
Written by Daisy Ruth
Loved: CM Punk might want the tag titles
It is quite telling that in trying to scrape some semblance of positive storytelling in this show, it fell upon a brief backstage segment to offer it.
WWE Champion CM Punk appeared in a backstage segment with Damian Priest just one week after namedropping him as a potential challenger for his title. Punk asked if they were good, Priest said they were, but if Punk is still the champion after SummerSlam he will be waiting for him.
Punk said that was okay while staring back at the tag team title belt sat on Priest’s shoulder, and said that maybe he could come back and try to become a double champion himself. It’s little things like that which make the product feel whole — someone actively wanting to win the different accolades within the company, rather than dismissing a title belt as beneath what they currently hold.
It may not go anywhere with Punk and Rhodes being little more than a “Can they coexist?” pairing at this weekend’s Saturday Night’s Main Event. But even then, there is at least an attempt to convey that this is a sport setting and people do indeed want to be champions of different degrees.
At the very least, Priest versus Punk sounds interesting. So the segment accomplished a little more toward this writer’s dream of a breathing ecosystem of competitors.
Written by Max Everett
Hated: Charlotte Flair gets rewarded with a match
Tonight there were two qualifying matches for entrants into the ladder match at SummerSlam. I was already annoyed by Tiffany Stratton qualifying in the first match because I despise champions getting shots for other titles (which my colleague also hated). Then, we immediately got a qualifying match that probably lasted two minutes. The first match had interference before the bell rang. This one had interference during the match. Jade Cargill was facing Nia Jax when Charlotte Flair attacked Michin on the outside. She immediately got in the ring to hit Cargill with a big boot. The match was thrown out and Cargill won by DQ. Jax was rightfully irate and laid out Flair, leaving her open for Jaded.
Jax and Lash Legend complained to Pearce. Pearce didn’t agree with Flair’s actions … and rewarded her with a qualifying match next week against Jax.
It’s understandable that Flair wants revenge for what happened to Alexa Bliss last week, but by attacking Cargill, she allowed Cargill to advance to the match. Why not just cause a distraction so that Jax gets the win and costs Cargill a title shot? Rhea Ripley not being cleared has thrown things out of whack because it seemed like Flair and Cargill were going to face each other at SummerSlam. Assuming Cargill, Michin, or B-Fab doesn’t cost Flair the match next week, Flair and Cargill would face each other in the ladder match. Why not just have both women qualify on their own? Instead, Jax could potentially get screwed two weeks in a row and for what? Everything around this SummerSlam match is a mess.
Written by Samantha Schipman
Loved: Tag team wrestling lives
Don’t look now, but somewhere in between the backstage interviews and the interference finishes, a damn good wrestling match broke out on “SmackDown this week!” And it wasn’t in the main event world title picture or the US title scene — it was a tag team match, and a somewhat random one at that. Turns out that even with no reason for anyone to care, when you put Fraxiom, one of the best tag teams WWE has to offer, in the ring with a War Raiders team that can still go despite their combined history of neck injuries, you can still make something happen thanks to the magic of tag team wrestling.
This was just really good from start to finish. The two teams had surprisingly great chemistry, with Fraxiom’s speed playing well against the Raiders’ power, and a very modern, aggressive pace that didn’t just throw out the same old “face in peril, hot tag” formula. To be clear, that formula is still very good and works well, but in WWE you rarely get to see other kinds of tag team wrestling, and it was really refreshing. There were frequent tags, creative spots, and big near-falls, to the extent that the Albany crowd, who were murmuring and sitting on their hands for the start of this one, were awake and making noise by the end. These two teams had nothing to work with going in, but they pulled a legitimate banger solely out of quality in-ring work.
Tag team wrestling is a dying art form in WWE, a place where R-Truth and Austin Theory are tag champs and the division is currently staring down the potential return of Enzo Amore. Tonight, however, two great teams put on a great match and reminded the world why tag team wrestling is the best kind of wrestling.
Written by Miles Schneiderman
Hated: A waste of a main event
GUNTHER and Cody Rhodes will be opposite one another in a tag team match alongside Sami Zayn and CM Punk respectively this weekend. GUNTHER and Cody Rhodes have wrestled four matches, three singles and one triple threat, against one another in two months. So naturally, in trying to keep some of the mystique, Rhodes and GUNTHER wrestled one another in the main event of tonight’s show.
Rhodes is like the Kryptonite to GUNTHER’s Superman, the silver to the werewolf, the Paul Levesque to WWE’s creative department. He just has a way of making GUNTHER look ostensibly bad, beating him in the ring no matter what and sponging all of the offense that had made the entire roster weak at the knees before. Years of building GUNTHER out as a semi-unstoppable force, a Herculean task for would-be champions to come, has been undone in two months of working with Rhodes.
He feels beatable, like he stood absolutely no chance of winning tonight’s match. Go figure, he didn’t. And that’s because GUNTHER and Rhodes are already wrestling this weekend. There was never going to be any decisive finish to this main event. A jumped-up preview to tomorrow night’s show, nothing more.
Instead, GUNTHER was made to look like a total dork. He threw everything at Rhodes and it wasn’t enough. Rhodes fought through and had the match arguably won before Zayn made his presence known at ringside and attacked him to cause the disqualification.
It was all just a waste of time in lieu of something actually compelling or in anyway designed to have a conclusion or development. The tag match was already happening this weekend and will presumably have a result, so there was no need for this match to exist. Alas, there was a show tonight and there was no other better idea to come from the self-proclaimed creative powerhouse. So this was the main event.
Loved: WWE adds hot stipulation to SNME tag match
In the opening minutes of “SmackDown” tonight, we learned that tomorrow’s tag match, pitting Undisputed WWE Champion CM Punk and Cody Rhodes against GUNTHER and Sami Zayn, actually has some stakes to it, rather than it just being a trope-y “can they co-exist?!” tag team match. It was revealed that if Zayn and GUNTHER win, they’ll be added to the title match at SummerSlam, making the bout a fatal four-way.
While I don’t necessarily believe “WWE Raw” General Manager Adam Pearce, who filled in for a presumably injured Nick Aldis, that Aldis was about to tell GUNTHER that last week, before “The Career Killer” attacked him, I still like that it was added. I still don’t think GUNTHER and Zayn have any chance of winning, but it helps the match feel a little more urgent, and also cleans things up a bit. Zayn and GUNTHER had no real reason to team together and work as more of a unit, and now they do.
It was actually Candice LeRae to highlight this more when she talked to GUNTHER in a backstage segment, alongside Johnny Gargano laid out on a travel case, of course. LeRae basically said that “The Ring General” and Zayn have to get along, so they’re both added to the bout at SummerSlam. GUNTHER seemed to agree, and told LeRae to tell Zayn to remember that and to stay out of his way tomorrow. While the stipulation may have been clear before that segment, I thought it helped drive the point home a little more. It also reinforced Zayn’s relationship with Gargano and LeRae a little more, though I also doubt anything comes from that for “Johnny Wrestling” at this point.
I figured the tag match was made for Madison Square Garden to get big names on the show to drive ticket sales. While that’s probably true, at least WWE came up with something to make it feel more high-stakes, even if there’s little chance that GUNTHER and Zayn end up in a four-way match for the gold at SummerSlam.
Written by Daisy Ruth
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