4 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (July 19)
It's getting tougher to find the silver linings some weeks, and this was a rough one.
How do you rate an episode of Raw that had only a handful of passable moments, several questionable ones, and an absolutely shameless attempt at using someone’s stellar image to perform damage control for the entire company?
This was not the worst Monday Night Raw in recent memory – far from it. But while Raw wasn’t horrendous, it was far from good. The positives highlighted here aren’t glowing moments. They’re silver-lining types of items. And the negatives, well, some of them were marginal, but there was no wiggle room with two moments.
WWE has been reeling from the allegations facing its (former) chairman Vince McMahon and has been trying to project a more positive image. Their response was to roll out Titus O’Neil to open Raw and talk about all the goodness that WWE stands for. You’d think WWE was the Food Bank, Salvation Army and Mother Theresa all rolled into one listening to that opening.
Later on, we watched the Raw women’s division become a punchline for the long-unfunny “joke” that is the 24/7 Championship, showing how close to the bottom of the barrel this company has reached. It’s amazing how a show that one week can be entertaining as hell can then produce something like this. “Wildly inconsistent” would be a polite term.
Let’s get to it…