Fixing the Biggest Mistakes Made Thus Far in 2021 WWE Draft

The 2021 WWE draft fired off its first salvos on Friday's edition of SmackDown and won't resume until Monday night's Raw broadcast.

But looking at the early results, the landscape of WWE has dramatically changed for the foreseeable future. Some of it is for the better—that SmackDown main event scene looks great on paper. Some of the changes, though, leave more questions than answers.

The biggest whiffs of the draft proceedings aren't hard to identify as two brands and television networks compete for Superstars. Let's look at them—and attempt to make fixes.

Mistake No. 1: The Women's Title Scenes

SmackDown used its second pick in Round 1, third overall, to select Charlotte Flair. That's fine and understandable, outside of the fact that she just so happens to be the Raw women's champion.

WWE could easily fix this by just having Flair lose the title on Raw before the roster changes go into effect later in October. But that creates a predictable situation for viewers over the next few weeks.

Normally this wouldn't be a big ordeal, as most titles don't have a show's brand name slapped on them for good measure. The universal title, among others, has swapped in the past, no problem. Tag teams that swapped brands have swapped title sets equally too.

Here the most obvious thing would be to send Becky Lynch to Raw on Monday night. She wasn't drafted Friday because WWE wouldn't tell fans who was eligible to be drafted, but she will undoubtedly be one of the first picks Monday.

Have Flair and Lynch swap belts and call it a day. Raw desperately needs help across the board after feeling like the B-show for a long time anyway, and it already added Bianca Belair, who still has serious issues with Lynch.

Mistake No. 2: The Raw Main Event Scene

Speaking of the programming that has made Raw feel like the B-show pretty much since SmackDown went to Fox in 2019, its main event scene managed to get every worse Friday night.

While SmackDown snapped up Drew McIntyre, Jeff Hardy and even potential solo stars like Kofi Kingston and Happy Corbin, Raw snagged Edge.

Look, Edge is a modern legend, it's fun when he's around and he could have some great feuds. But he's effectively a part-timer who isn't going to freshen up the main event scene, where Big E needs challengers. McIntyre, on the other hand, is assuredly gunning for Roman Reigns on the blue brand.

The obvious move would be for Raw to swipe Brock Lesnar, who says he's a free agent. He will still have that feud with Reigns soon, but he can then turn his attention to that oft-requested match with Bobby Lashley and then help hype up Keith Lee and Big E as the next generation, just like he did for McIntyre.

Failing that, adding a Seth Rollins-level guy who can be a consistent challenger to Big E would make a ton of sense to make Raw a must-see show again.

Mistake No. 3: Breaking Up New Day 

Seriously, can WWE just stop this, please?

At this point, it almost feels spiteful that WWE keeps splitting up New Day—this time right after they reunited. To make it more blatant and ridiculous, New Day has been drafted as a stable in the past—but this time, Raw chose to only draft Big E with the second overall pick and then passed on the rest of New Day two more times (in order to draft Belair and RK-Bro) before Raw took them with the third pick in Round 2.

By WWE's own rules in the past, Raw could have easily just drafted all three as a stable. Raw then drafted multiple teams together with two more picks Friday night.

So WWE needs to fix this and send fans home happy. Make a trade. An exception. A new rule. A "winner goes to the other brand" match. Anything.

Look, WWE didn't even tell us who was available during Friday's draft. It didn't even tell us why SmackDown got to pick first this year and why Raw didn't get an extra pick each round to compensate. This is also the draft process from the same company that accidentally leaked the results before the shows went on air a few years ago.

So yes, WWE can make up a way to trade between brands during the draft and fix this. It's the right thing to do and would only serve to help a subpar-feeling show.