How much wrestling actually happened at Elimination Chamber 2022?

WWE featured six total matches on the main card of Elimination Chamber 2022, which took place on Feb. 19 in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The main card of this pay-per-view (PPV) lasted 2 hours, 50 minutes, and 11 seconds (2h 50m 11s). Here is a sorted list of the bell-to-bell times for the six matches that took place during this event:

• 15m 41s: Women’s Elimination Chamber
• 14m 56s: WWE Championship Elimination Chamber
• 12m 14s: Becky Lynch vs. Lita
• 9m 14s: Naomi & Rousey vs. Deville & Flair
• 9m 07s: Drew McIntyre vs. Madcap Moss
• 5m 59s: Roman Reigns vs. Goldberg

These times add up to 1h 07m 11s, which is roughly 39.5% of the show. For comparison’s sake, the overall match time percentage for all WWE PPVs since the start of 2013 is 53.9%.

The match time percentage of 39.5% is the lowest number I have ever recorded out of all 126 WWE PPVs going back to the start of 2013, beating out WrestleMania 31’s longstanding mark of 41.2%. WWE somehow booked a premium event with a run time approaching three hours that included barely more than an hour of wrestling matches. There wasn’t a single match on this card that reached 16 minutes in length.

One of the reasons this happened is because WWE booked the two shortest Elimination Chamber matches in the history of the gimmick. They did this by severely cutting down the waiting intervals from their typical lengths of four or five minutes, and falsely advertising six competitors in the men’s match when they knew one of those men would not compete. Brock Lesnar easily steamrolling through all the losers on Raw was also a factor, of course.

Here are the approximate lengths of the four waiting periods in the women’s chamber:

Period 1: 2m 02s
Period 2: 2m 20s
Period 3: 2m 14s
Period 4: 2m 12s

And here are the approximate lengths of the three waiting periods in the men’s chamber:

Period 1: 3m 08s
Period 2: 2m 25s
Period 3: 3m 23s

WWE covered their tracks to some extent by saying there would be “regularly scheduled intervals” in the Chamber matches and not specifying an exact length of time. One can argue that the women’s match was in the ballpark of a regular interval of 2m 11s or so, but the men’s match clearly didn’t have a regular interval across the waiting periods.

For the sake of completeness, here are the approximate survival times of the participants in the Elimination Chamber matches:

12m 08s: Liv Morgan
8m 40s: Alexa Bliss
8m 05s: Rhea Ripley
6m 40s: Doudrop
6m 28s: Bianca Belair
6m 20s: Nikki A.S.H.

14m 56s: Austin Theory
9m 52s: Seth Rollins
6m 50s: Matt Riddle
5m 25s: Brock Lesnar
5m 11s: AJ Styles

So if the bell-to-bell matches only took up 39.5% of this event, then what took up the other 60.5% of the show?

The pre-match segments (entrances and any related video packages that air right before a match begins) took up a big chunk of time. The pre-match segment for Goldberg’s match lasted 12 minutes, but the bell-to-bell match was half that time. The pre-match segment for the men’s chamber lasted over 15 minutes, which is longer than the match itself. The pre-match segments for McIntyre and Rousey’s matches both surpassed seven minutes in length, whereas the actual matches were only a couple minutes longer. The entrances for the women’s chamber lasted nearly 10 minutes, and that’s not counting the Elimination Chamber hype video that aired prior to their entrances. The Viking Raiders had an entrance and no match.

Becky’s pre-match segment lasted four minutes, so it was pretty much the only one on the card that did not come close to approaching the time of the match itself.

WWE also spent over six minutes promoting the Undertaker’s upcoming Hall of Fame induction, mostly in the form of a video package. Some of the other videos scattered across the show included hype for WrestleMania 38, a Seth Rollins hype package, and WWE wrestlers spending time in Saudi Arabia.

Add it all up, and there was a ton of flash and filler on this card, with very little substance behind it.

Are you surprised by any of these results, Cagesiders? Which of these matches received less (or more) time than you hoped for?