6 Ups And 7 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (March 25)
Title feuds starting to run on fumes; is it Mania time yet?
Thank goodness we’re in the home stretch of the Road to WrestleMania, because Raw is running out of steam. The penultimate Raw before Mania was chock full of storylines and other new developments flying by at a breakneck pace, but one thing was clear:
WWE clearly has run out of ideas for a couple feuds and is just keeping them alive in public view, while few are truly building. (Contrast, for example, Finn Balor’s constant struggle for the Intercontinental Championship versus Kofi Kingston’s battles to earn a WWE Championship match.)
We have two battle royals that have all of three declared participants, two of whom are Saturday Night Live cast members. We saw the Hart Foundation announced for the WWE Hall of Fame, allowing Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart to be inducted months after his passing. We saw Hall-of-Famers put on mini-displays that made you miss them when they were active. And we saw the announcement that women will close out Mania this year.
All of this means we’re reaching the end of the line here, as WWE should just be in hard sell mode next week. And yet, we still don’t have a Raw tag title match (though it looks pretty obvious), and the women’s battle royal, which had its troubled first year last year, hasn’t even been announced.
With that said, let’s see how things panned out this week. Let’s get to it…