WWE News: How did the SmackDown Live rating fare with the return of John Cena?

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John Cena made the Fatal-5-Way for the WWE Championship at Fastlane a Six Pack Challenge

What's the story?

PWInsider is reporting on the recent viewership for SmackDown Live this week, and its good news for the WWE as John Cena did provide small ratings boost with a little more than a week left from WWE Fastlane.

In case you didn't know...

Since SmackDown Live's move to Tuesday nights on the USA Network, the ratings have only topped three million twice. The very first night they went live on July 19, 2016, and the Tuesday after WrestleMania in 2017.

The heart of the matter

SmackDown Live for February 27th pulled in a total of 2.692 million viewers; which is up from 2.613 million on the February 20th show. While the nearly 80,000 increase in viewership isn't a massive jump, it is a 3% improvement from the prior week. At the exact same point last year, the viewership was down to 2.566 million.

The main event of this week's SmackDown Live saw John Cena take on AJ Styles, and if Cena was victorious, he would be added to the Fatal-5-Way for the WWE Championship. Cena took advantage of his free agent status on his contract to be able to appear on the show two days after appearing on the Raw-branded Elimination Chamber pay per view.

The WWE Championship will now be a Six Pack Challenge featuring the champion, AJ Styles, John Cena, Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, Baron Corbin, and Dolph Ziggler.

What's next?

WWE Fastlane is on March 11th and there is one more episode of SmackDown Live before then. That episode will take place at the Resch Center in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Author's take

Though it was a minor increase in viewership, I think it was a pretty solid edition of SmackDown Live. The AJ Styles and John Cena match was really good, as expected, even though a lot in the WWE Universe didn't really want to see John Cena abuse his free agent status like this.

In the end, it's not going to matter because I fully expect AJ Styles to come out of Fastlane the champion to give us that dream match at WrestleMania with Shinsuke Nakamura.