Trying To Make Sense Out Of The Finish From Sunday

We're five days removed from WWE Battleground 2017 and I'm still unsure about what happened with the US Championship match.

For those unaware - and I'm guessing that's nobody reading this - AJ Styles lost the United States Championship to Kevin Owens. The story being that Owens was a strong underdog at the time of the match.

I've read and listened to a lot of stories discussing what went down. There are a few narratives out there. They range from botched finishes, Shane McMahon was supposed to have been involved, commotion backstage because AJ Styles was supposed to have retained and also a story that the finish was changed mid-match.

And more.

To be honest - I don't know which story to go with.

What I think is worth mentioning is that almost everything that has been written has pointed to the betting odds as the indicator that the original plan was for AJ Styles to win. This is correct. Styles closed as a -4,950 favourite. His price came in along with all of the other eventual winners in the few hours before the pay-per-view.

This doesn't mean Kevin Owens wasn't being backed during the weekend. He was. Not significantly, but he was.

If you look at the table above, you'll see that Owens' price - which had stayed at +160 from Saturday night and through most of Sunday began to descend by the early evening. At 10pm BST, the eventual winner was a -350 favourite. However, by 11pm, Styles' price began to decline and was the aforementioned -4,950 with an hour to go until the start of the show.

That was how Owens' price fell offshore. It also happened domestically.

In a post published on Saturday morning, I pointed out that the prices for a number of outsiders had been backed overnight in the markets that were available on Paddy Power's WWE Betting Page. Of the names that were backed, the only selections that ended up winning their respective matches were Aiden English (7/2 to 13/8), Natalya (who dipped from 10/1 into 8/1) and Owens (15/8 to 5/4).

A second flurry of wagers came in a few hours later. At this point, Sami Zayn (5/4 to 1/4) and Owens - who had drifted out to 3/1 by that point - were backed. The latter fell into 1/6.

The names that were backed in both flurries were Randy Orton, Baron Corbin, The Usos, Charlotte Flair and Kevin Owens. The only winner of the five was Owens. 

In the post where I covered the Saturday afternoon moves in favour of Owens, I wrote:

I wasn't the only one who thought the backing of Kevin Owens was peculiar. It didn't make sense at the time. 

It's worth noting that Kevin Owens did close as a favourite when Paddy Power's book was closed at 10pm BST. There's a valid reason why - it's because he was chalk with 5Dimes at that time.

The US Championship landed back on AJ Styles during Tuesday's edition of Smackdown. To start off the show, the company brought back Chris Jericho and set up a triple threat match which saw Owens defend the strap in a triple threat match against his most recent foes.

It could be argued that the Jericho thing was a result of the botch and they made it a triple threat to cover up the fact that they wanted to put the title back on Styles. The other side of the coin would argue that Jericho's surprise return may have been a reason why the Battleground result was changed as it made more sense for the deck to be stacked against Kevin Owens as champion than it would for him as a  challenger. Losing the strap the way he did (Styles pinned Jericho) would strengthen his gripe against Shane McMahon if this is leading to a Kevin Owens .vs. Shane McMahon match. 

Another thing to watch out for is next week's episode of Smackdown. 

Owens has asked for his rematch, so it'll be interesting to see if Shane McMahon over-rules him and says he doesn't get a rematch or there's some sort of finish where McMahon interjects and restarts the match. I'm intrigued to see if it plays out this way as it would fuel the suggestion that Sunday's match was a screw-up and this is Plan B.

Or C.

So - to close - I still have no answers other than to point out that, even though the closing money was on Styles retaining the title at Battleground, there were people backing a Kevin Owens win at certain points during the weekend.