7 Ups And 7 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw Superstar Shakeup
A bunch of debuts, a lot of stalled progress due to shakeup, and a HUGE beatdown.
Monday Night Raw promised to shake things up a big, and shake they did, as more than 10 wrestlers and valets made the jump to Raw this week, to varying degrees of success. However, we won’t find out which Raw performers took their final bow (for now) on WWE’s flagship show until Tuesday night.
Raw saw Bray Wyatt, Dean Ambrose, the Miz, Alexa Bliss, Mickie James, Apollo Crews, Curt Hawkins and others join the red brand. It remains to be seen who will replace these wrestlers on SmackDown Tuesday. In that regard, it’s tough to label the “Superstar Shakeup” as either a success or a failure. Marketing/booking in these initial stages could play a big role in that decision.
We saw several matches that were neither great nor terrible, so several fell into the nebulous "eh" category (think Finn Balor/Jinder Mahal, eight-man tag, etc.). And we saw the Drifter saunter onto the entrance ramp and then... drift away, so that's a little tough to quantify as well.
In addition to the new faces, we learned that Seth Rollins very most likely will end up staying put, as GM Kurt Angle gave him his seal of approval. It was tough to characterize that as a positive or a negative, especially on a show in which a man tipped over an ambulance. Rollins getting a spotlight segment was interesting, but didn’t clear up a lot, other than he’s still alive and still looking for redemption in some ways.
With that said, let’s find out what moved up in the world and what plummeted to the basement. Let’s get to it…