WWE Reportedly Holding Smackville Event As Last Minute Counter Programming Rehearsal

WWE is running a special next Saturday night called Smackville. Essentially they are transforming a regular Nashville house show into a WWE Network special, but the real question is why they are doing this.

Smackville will be an hour-long special where we will see an IC Title match between Shinsuke Nakamura and Finn Balor followed by a WWE Title Triple Threat Match with Kofi Kingston defending his title against both Samoa Joe and Dolph Ziggler. However, the reasoning why WWE is doing this special is the very interesting part.

Fightful Select reports that WWE threw this special event together at the last minute to make sure that they could. The need is now there to be able to run special events with very short notice. It looks like they won’t have an issue with Smackville, but practice makes perfect.

I’ve been told WWE is doing this for a variety of reasons, including to seeing how smooth things run on somewhat short notice, which doesn’t seem to be much of an issue for them. Another person involved suggested it was to gauge how well they could counter program on short notice. 

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We can only imagine what WWE might be thinking about next when it comes to putting together last minute special events. You also have to wonder if they would be so concerned about running last minute events if AEW wasn’t a thing.

All of these are very interesting questions, but the one thing we can be sure of is that it means we have another special on Saturday night.