8 Ups And 4 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (April 3)
SmarkaMania runs wild as NXT's Top Guys arrive and a Demon King returns.
The raucous Raw after WrestleMania has become a tradition in its own right.
Dubbed SmarkaMania by some, the event features a lot of the fans who attended Mania the previous night and includes a lot of what you would call “smart fans.” These fans don’t typically buy what WWE is selling, resulting in different reactions from the crowd rather than what they expect.
Ever since WWE “adopted” this event as an actual thing, it got bastardized and made into a joke, with the announcers saying the crowd was full of “nontraditional fans.” Yep, because the people who fly around the world and spend thousands of dollars to watch wrestling are not your traditional fans – they’re super fans, right?
Raw after Mania has become a popular weekend for debuting wrestlers to show up, which only happened with one act Monday night. Beyond that, we saw a couple superstars return to the Raw brand, including a former Universal Champion. We also saw a new Raw GM emerge, and he immediately became a big upgrade over the previous authority figures. And we saw the new Universal Champion issue a challenge buy have it accepted by someone else.
It wasn’t the most newsworthy Raw after Mania, but it was an action-packed episode. Let’s find out what hit the ground running and what just hit the ground.