2-out-of-3 Falls Matches on WWE television are rare, but there were two last week. Both Raw and SmackDown LIVE featured a 2-out-of-3 Falls Match, with The New Day defeating Baron Corbin, Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn in two consecutive falls on Raw, followed by WWE Champion Kofi Kingston and Universal Champion Seth Rollins defeating Owens and Zayn 2-0 on SmackDown LIVE.
The reason for this is because Vince McMahon doesn’t want commercial breaks taking place during matches on Raw and SmackDown.
“Apparently, there was a meeting last week and Vince just told everybody that there is no more wrestling during commercial breaks,” Bryan Alvarez said on Wrestling Observer Radio.
“Basically, you can have a match that goes through a break but there can’t be wrestling during the break. Therefore, you have to have multi-fall matches or different things like that. That’s why we had those random best of three falls matches on TV on Monday and Tuesday.”
According to Dave Meltzer of F4WOnline and John Pollock of POST Wrestling, McMahon’s reason for the change is because real sports don’t have action during commercial breaks so they won’t anymore.
On SmackDown, WWE holds two matches per show that run during the commercial breaks with the picture-in-picture on the USA Network. It is unknown if this will continue on SmackDown.
PWInsider also reported on the rule change and were pretty much told the same thing. All television matches are to end within the same segment and not run over the course of multiple segments. The exception to the rule are matches with multiple falls as each fall would take place within one segment.
PWInsider was also told by a WWE source that the idea of holding matches with multiple rounds was recently pitched. This idea is based on the European wrestling format of timed rounds, with judges and points, in the vein of boxing matches.
