10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About Rhea Ripley
9. The Beat The Clock Bullsh*t
WWE are a content factory first and a wrestling company second.
Understanding this helps in fundamentally understanding why so much of the main roster product - and particularly Monday Night Raw - is the way it is. WWE is theoretically episodic, but the connections from one week to the next often need not exist considering how little the creative seems to worry about continuity or consistency or even which side of the heel/babyface divide a character resides on.
All of this has doomed Ripley's first reign as Raw Women's Champion, and never was this more evident than in the build to her (sort of) long awaited 2021 singles clash with Charlotte Flair at Hell In A Cell.
Embroiled in a race to the bottom, both Champion and Challenger lost Beat The Clock challenges to Nikki Cross by forgetting how to tell time, or simply being too stupid to remember a stipulation they set up literally two minutes earlier. Cross didn't even get over from it - her role in all of this was celebrating not losing as if she'd just won an Iron Women match.
WWE didn't just want you to forget all this - they told you to. None of it factored into the Cell clash, nor even the video package to set it up. It all existed solely to fill WWE's TV time, and waste yours.