3 Ups & 8 Downs From WWE Raw (Oct 11)

4. 3 Minutes

Doudrop Natalya
WWE.com

If you set your stopwatch on Monday night, you might have noticed that the pre-match brawl between Bianca Belair, Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch and Charlotte Flair lasted more than 3 minutes heading into the commercial break.

That’s really not a big deal until you realize that each Queen’s Tournament quarterfinal match (two on SmackDown and two on Raw) was shorter than this brawl. Monday’s bouts lasted about 90 seconds (Dana Booke/Shayna Baszler) and 3 minutes (Doudrop/Natalya).

That’s a really embarrassing point to make here, to note that a meaningless brawl lasted longer than each of the four opening matches of the first edition of this “prestigious” new tournament. By comparison, each of the four opening round matches of the men’s King of the Ring tourney lasted longer than all four women’s contests combined.

Just a reminder to anyone who says that WWE has the premier women’s wrestling right now – they might want to qualify that statement.

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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.