Damian Priest has reportedly been receiving high praise in WWE. (Credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
WWE Saturday Night’s Main Event may have finally marked the end of the long-running rivalry between Damian Priest and Drew McIntyre.
At WWE’s latest installment of its NBC special, Priest beat McIntyre after demolishing him with a Con-Chair-To and waltzing out of the steel cage inside Tampa’s Yuengling Center. SmackDown’s two colossal stars clashed in a fantastic steel cage match that ideally will end one of WWE’s lengthiest feuds.
After all, if there’s ever a way to end a grudge feud, it’s inside a steel cage.
McIntyre and Priest have battled back and forth since early 2024, first going to war over the World Heavyweight Championship on Raw before transitioning their feud over to SmackDown. Things weren’t always going well, either. After Priest lost the World title and McIntyre found himself stuck in no man’s land following an epic feud with CM Punk, a title-less feud with one another felt, well, kind of pointless.
Even McIntyre himself expressed his unhappiness with his path to WrestleMania 41, where he topped Priest in a very good Sin City Street Fight that was one of the few highlights of WrestleMania weekend. Their match quality was never the issue, but there was an overall sense of fans being underwhelmed by their rivalry.
Still, in the weeks since WrestleMania 41, McIntyre and Priest have done a good job of making their feud more interesting. Given the history between the two stars, after all, it makes sense that they have spent much of the past two years going at it, whether or not a title was involved.
This is not a rivalry that fans will be talking about 10 years from now, but after Priest’s decisive and somewhat surprising victory at WWE Saturday Night’s Main Event, both Priest and McIntyre are still strongly positioned as cornerstones of the main event picture.
Perhaps most notably, Priest has been receiving widespread praise backstage in WWE for his performance during this feud with McIntyre. Even though Priest is a former world champion, this storyline has, in a way, allowed him to prove that he belongs in the upper echelon of WWE stars.
As World Heavyweight Champion, Priest was clearly a placeholder champion utilized as a means to transition the title onto Gunther. But tonight, he picked up a significant victory over McIntyre, one of WWE’s best all-around performers.
Though Priest doesn’t figure to factor into the world title picture again anytime soon, McIntyre is a strong candidate to emerge as a world title contender soon, even after a loss in Tampa.
Especially with a potential WWE draft taking place soon, McIntyre is on a short list of potential world title challengers, whether that’s against John Cena or Jey Uso. Given the spotlight they got at WWE Saturday Night’s Main Event and the crowd reaction to their match, the logical assumption is that McIntyre and Priest are being repositioned as a top acts once again.
McIntyre, after all, is making strides toward becoming WWE’s next Hollywood star, so WWE would be wise to feature him prominently in the months ahead. Priest, meanwhile, just picked up one of the biggest wins of his career. Although this feud got off to a rocky start, it has done wonders for both men as they’re transforming into bigger stars right before fans’ eyes.
At WWE Saturday Night’s Main Event, McIntyre may have technically lost, but truth be told, both McIntyre and Priest were winners here.
