3 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Raw (22 December - Results & Review)

1. Inconsequential Wrestling

If ever there was a phone-in holiday season Raw, Monday’s episode was it.

Raw barely clocked in at 90 minutes, minus commercials (not that that’s a complaint), with four matches that were immediately forgotten by the time the show went off the air. Consider: There were two singles matches involving representatives from feuding women’s tag teams, an NXT wrestler facing a jobber under a mask, and a main event tag involving the Vision and CM Punk that was immediately followed by a Vision beatdown again.

One of the matches (Rhea Ripley versus Asuka) was pretty good, but otherwise, this was some of the most skippable wrestling television you’ll see. Even AEW Collision at its low point still produced good in-ring action and might have a hidden gem each week. This was placeholder stuff, immediately irrelevant and only serving to promote matches taking place in two weeks. (That doesn’t bode well for next week’s Raw.)

It's at times like these when you’re watching an episode like this that you wonder why WWE doesn’t just do an awards show, of even a “Best of Raw 2025” where they pick five of the best television matches to re-air, perhaps with some added interviews. That at least would be meaningful by calling attention to the positives instead of just churning out “C-” content.