JBL thinks the push to make the Royal Rumble a two-night event is coming from ESPN rather than from WWE, and that it is about the deadest weekend in American sport.
Speaking on Something To Wrestle, he made clear he has no inside knowledge before setting out the logic.
“I would think it’s both. I don’t have any insight into what they’re doing, but obviously it’s a negotiation of both, and it’s probably ESPN. I’m sure they’re looking for something that weekend.”
The weekend in question is the gap between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl, a stretch the NFL has spent years failing to solve.
“That is one of the most dead weekends in sports. The NFL has tried to figure out a way to figure out what to do that weekend. The Hall of Fame game was never a huge draw, and so they’re trying to figure out a way to do something for that weekend.”
“I feel like that would probably be ESPN saying, we have a really big problem here with this weekend keeping people around leading up to the Super Bowl. People just forget, for lack of a better term, storylines in the Super Bowls and things like that.”
The reason he thinks the network is driving it rather than the venue is that the money is in the broadcast.
“I think probably ESPN, because the rights fees, that’s just a matter of negotiating which town is going to do it on what weekend. I don’t see how that would matter between January and February.”
On the wrestling side, he thinks the case for splitting it is obvious.
“The Rumble takes so long, well over an hour for the one match, and then you have the women’s match as well, so both of them are over an hour. And depending on the year, one’s going to be a bigger draw than the other, but both are big draws, and they’re the culmination of storylines.”
“They start the road to WrestleMania. So they’re big deals, these Royal Rumbles. So yeah, I think it makes perfect sense to separate the Rumbles from one night to the next, and then dress those around with the matches that you want.”
The Super Bowl came up because of one of his own, and it produced the biggest fine he says he ever took from WWE.
“The biggest fine I’ve ever gotten from WWE was because of a Super Bowl in Arizona.”
The trip had several legs. JBL had been in Las Vegas for a UFC event, which he thinks may have been one of Brock Lesnar’s and which he believes he attended with The Undertaker, then traveled to Arizona for the game, with a WWE television date in West Texas afterwards.
“I believe that was the Super Bowl where Eli Manning threw the touchdown at the end and knocked off the undefeated season with Tom Brady, because I remember I was sitting toward the end zone when the guy was manned up on the corner and there’s man coverage, like what are you doing, man coverage, and Manning just throws the ball in the air and of course the receiver gets it.”
That is Super Bowl XLII, played in Glendale, Arizona in February 2008, in which the New York Giants beat a New England Patriots side that had gone the entire season unbeaten. JBL says he had wanted to see the perfect season completed, being a fan of neither team.
“When I get done, winds caused the airport to be closed, and so the only way to get me out was by commercial, and it cost like $15,000 to get me from Arizona to West Texas.”
Vince McMahon was not pleased.
“Vince comes up and goes, I want you to pay half. And I said, I’m surprised you’re paying any of it. Thank you.”
JBL thinks the fine was based on a misunderstanding of what he had actually been doing.
“He thought I’d been to a party because I was in Vegas on Saturday night at a UFC fight or something. And then I went down to the Super Bowl, and Vince thought I was at a Super Bowl party. He didn’t realize I was going to the Super Bowl. He might have been a little more generous to me.”
“But he paid for half of it, so it cost me like $7,500 to get to Lubbock, Texas.”
The show he was fighting to reach may have been a memorable one for other reasons.
“I believe it was Lubbock, and I think that’s when I went out on the horse, and the horse damn near killed me.”
The ESPN relationship is new enough that the two-night question is a live one. WWE’s premium live events moved to the network in the United States this year, with SummerSlam already having expanded to two nights and drawing crowds at U.S. Bank Stadium across both.
The 2027 Royal Rumble was confirmed this week for Arizona in February, announced at a press conference by UFC CEO Dana White as part of TKO’s partnership with the Arizona Sports and Events Alliance. That deal covers seven events across three years spanning WWE, UFC, Professional Bull Riders and Zuffa Boxing, with Bryan Alvarez having reported at the time it was signed that the three WWE dates were Survivor Series, Royal Rumble and Saturday Night’s Main Event.
No venue has been announced. Arizona has two options in State Farm Stadium in Glendale, which held WrestleMania XXVI in 2010, and Chase Field in Phoenix, which staged the 2019 Royal Rumble. Glendale is also where JBL watched the Giants beat the Patriots.
The February date is itself a shift. The 2026 Royal Rumble was held in Saudi Arabia in January, and moving it to February takes it later in the calendar as well as back to American soil, which is consistent with the Super Bowl bye weekend theory.
