3 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (Nov 21)

5. What Was The Opener Supposed To Be?

The Brawling Brutes
WWE.com

If you love promo trains that say very little and impromptu matches, then the opening segment was just for you.

Kevin Owens, who often can do no wrong, came out to explain why he returned last week on SmackDown to join the Brawling Brutes and Drew McIntyre to take on the Bloodline. Of course, if you’ve watched WWE programming for the past two years, you already know the answer, but WWE needs to spoon-feed the storylines to its audience.

This brought out his teammates, which somehow triggered The Judgment Day. And then this gave way to a six-man tag match because Finn Balor said some fightin’ words, and Sheamus decided that that should lead to a fight.

While the match itself was perfectly fine (more on that later), it takes five seconds to ask the question: What was supposed to follow KO’s promo and fill those 15 minutes that the match occupied?

Brawling Brutes versus Judgment Day could actually be a rivalry with some stakes or a storyline, but here, it was set up with a five-minute back-and-forth and burned out on free TV because Raw is three hours and we’ve got to fill it somehow.

Advertisement
Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.