4 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (6 Jul - Results & Review)
Sami's title reign comes to an abrupt halt, Rollins puts audience to sleep, a rare Oba misfire.
Depending on your point of view, Monday Night Raw either represented a triumph in energetic, surprise booking from WWE, or it was the desperate actions of a desperate promotion.
WWE pulled a rare bait-and-switch with its advertised Undisputed WWE Championship match that actually paid off to both the live crowd and the viewing audience, with Cody Rhodes being taken out in the opening moments for Raw, leading to a show-long angle of whether he could get cleared and then who would take his place in the main event.
Raw’s location Monday night – Chicago – would serve as a dead giveaway for who would be called in off the bench to wrestle for a world title, but that didn’t diminish the response from fans. They simply grew louder as the main event arrived, and then exploded once they were rewarded for their faith.
Beyond that story threaded throughout the program, Raw was at best a mixed bag of middling action, a boring show-opening promo from Seth Rollins, and a mind-numbing heel turn to “bolster” the ranks of The Vision.
But if you were wowed by the world title scene, Raw actually was an unqualified success, with everything else just treading water.
Let’s get to it…
DOWNS…
7. Michael Cole, WWE Historian
The Voice of WWE strikes again.
Michael Cole, anointed by WWE as its official vocal mascot, flubbed yet another fact Monday night, this one coming just after CM Punk had captured the Undisputed WWE Championship by defeating Sami Zayn. Punk’s win meant that Zayn’s reign ended at nine days.
Not missing an opportunity to botch like he’s Sol Ruca on the ropes, Cole blurted out that it was “the shortest world championship reign in nearly five years.”
Fun (actual) fact: this isn’t even the shortest world championship reign in the past year, with none other than Punk himself logging a five-minute reign at SummerSlam 2025 when Seth Rollins cashed in his Money in the Bank briefcase. And you can flash back to WrestleMania 40 when Drew McIntyre similarly had a five-minute world title reign ended via cash-in by Damian Priest.
Both of those title reigns were World Heavyweight Championship reigns, while the shortest Undisputed WWE Championship reign before Sami’s was The Miz’s eight-day reign in early 2021.
But Cole clearly said “world championship,” which isn’t title-specific. How should we as fans receive him as an authority on WWE when he can’t get basic facts correct, much less call moves and get names right?
6. Mid-Card Mayhem
Ah yes, it’s the all-too-crucial “building momentum” tag match ahead of a gauntlet match next week to determine the number one contender for the Intercontinental Championship.
Ethan Page and Rusev were running their mouths backstage and ended up picking a fight with Dragon Lee and Chad Gable, leading to this stakes-less tag match. Everyone ran through their spots quickly until a pier-six brawl ended with Dragon trapped in an Accolade and forced to tap out.
Gable would make the save, but he fell victim to a two-on-one attack. Joe Hendry (who also is involved in the seven-man gauntlet) tried to make the save, but he too was overwhelmed by the numbers.
There really wasn’t much (if anything) wrong with this segment, but it just served as filler, a reminder that these men existed ahead of next week’s gauntlet rather than a meaningful match of any sort.
5. A Lesser Confrontation
Nearly everything that Oba Femi has touched on the main roster has turned to gold, so much so that it’s incredibly rare when something doesn’t work out.
Yet, that’s where we found ourselves Monday night, with Oba coming out to interrupt Paul Heyman so the advocate could cut his in-ring promo while looking Femi straight in the face. Heyman was unfazed, and so was Oba when it came his turn to respond, though his comments were mostly forgettable lines.
It really wasn’t that great of a verbal jousting session. Maybe that’s due in part to the match being undesirable, but it’s WWE’s job to talk fans into the building for that match, not just assume that fans will blindly accept this rematch above Oba challenging Roman Reigns for the World Heavyweight Championship.
4. Delivering Money Matches Too Soon?
There will be plenty of praise for the main event coming, but it’s worth examining the potential drawbacks of these booking decisions.
Taking the title off Sami Zayn after nine days short-circuits a potentially fun run with an increasingly annoying Sami parading around as champion and escaping with his title intact, becoming more delusional with each passing week.
Running Zayn/CM Punk with no notice blows a potential money match and a feud that could have been built carefully, in favor of an impromptu blowoff for the title. Everything else now is just a rematch.
Conventional wisdom says that WWE will run Punk/Cody Rhodes at SummerSlam, blowing a legit WrestleMania main event on their second or third-biggest PLE with less than a month of buildup. Punk/Cody could be the kind of feud that wouldn’t get old even with two full months of dueling promos.
One could make the argument that this is a bit of desperation as WWE passes its big title around with shock changes, but then again, business is down a bit and the booking has become stale, so wouldn’t that suggest that shaking things up a bit is a good idea?
Regardless, there are potential downsides to this booking. Time will tell which direction things are trending.
3. Sol Shaky In Latest Win
It’s never a good sign when you’re a high-flyer and WWE makes it part of your persona that you try and fail a lot, but you keep persevering… and you’re a champion.
That’s more of a sign that the company recognizes that you screw up a lot, and they want to cover for it by saying you’re a risk-taker, so if you fall on your arse 50% of the time, it’s just par for the course.
Sol Ruca defended her Women’s Intercontinental Championship against Raquel Rodriguez Monday night, stumbling through a few spots in the early going before settling down a bit. She had a nice little comeback toward the end, flipping out of a chokeslam and struggling to get Raquel off her feet before the Judgment Day ran down to interfere, and they in turn were countered by Iyo Sky.
The distractions proved to take the attention away from the match itself and allowed for Ruca to hit a Sol Snatcher on Rodriguez for the win. This wasn’t an industry-revealing match, but it still bore the signs of a young wrestler struggling to make it through a match without flubbing something terribly.
2. Rollins Douses Cold Water On The Crowd
As hot as Raw opened with the backstage fracas involving Sami Zayn, Cody Rhodes, and Gunther, Seth Rollins immediately cooled things off considerably with a snoozer of a promo that retconned much of his history with Roman Reigns and The Shield.
Rollins set out to paint Roman as the “chosen one” in WWE, talking about how he was tapped as the next big star from the very beginning and was going to be pushed to the heavens, regardless of whether he could cut a promo or if he couldn’t “wrestle his way out of a paper bag.”
Seth tried to suggest that seeing Roman tapped for things he dreamt of as a child “broke something” inside him. He said he broke up The Shield and cashed in his Money in the Bank briefcase at WrestleMania 31 to catch up to Reigns, effectively trying to repaint those moments as him lashing out.
All of it was painful – and painfully dull. Fans fell deathly silent for much of this, clearly not invested in a word he was saying. They might be into the Rollins/Reigns match, but this wasn’t doing a damn thing to build it.
1. The Vision’s Secret Weapon
If you’re keeping score at home, The Vision is a stable of losers who lost a bunch of matches and their only titles in a short span of time, causing their manager to ditch them. They somehow gained a title rematch that they were on course to lose Monday night until another wrestler who has been a routine loser interfered.
Yep, if not for Maxxine Dupri’s low blow, The Vision would not have recaptured their World Tag Team Championships that they almost never defended previously. Read that again: Maxxine Dupri bailed out Austin Theory and future WrestleMania main-eventer Bron Breakker.
Just embarrassing stuff all around. You really have to feel for The Street Profits, who finally felt like they were getting on track after years of being stuck in neutral or being parked on the sidelines altogether. Instead, after a two-week reign, they were footnotes on Monday night, an answer to a trivia question about the best move Maxxine has executed in a wrestling ring: a low blow on Angelo Dawkins.
Imagine being a stable that was dependent on a completely hopeless wrestler like Dupri for help. It’s pretty much time to pack it in at that point. Instead, The Vision is probably just getting started with its latest retooling.
Oh, and despite getting the girl, Theory still got emasculated by Paul Heyman once again afterward. Mind-bogglingly dumb stuff here.
UPS…
4. Knight In Shining Armor
Just as Seth Rollins was about to put the Chicago fans to sleep with his show-opening promo, LA Knight rode to the rescue Monday night.
Knight interrupted Rollins and unloaded on Seth, Roman Reigns, and anyone else in his crosshairs. He vented about Rollins getting a world title match at SummerSlam simply by confronting Roman and trading “brothers” with his former Shield compatriot. LA alleged that this supposed “greatest generation” in WWE was really only great at one thing: being the biggest vomits in the business.
Fans seriously woke up for this promo, chanting for Knight as he unloaded, speaking about how he’d been screwed over by these supposed greats and their stables, but he wasn’t going to be deterred from his goal of winning a world title. It might not happen this calendar year for LA, but hearing him and the crowd reaction certainly made you believe that he believed it, and that’s what’s important in this situation.
3. Gunther Relieves Cody Of His Main Event Duties
OH MY GOD!! ?
Gunther has ATTACKED Cody Rhodes!!! pic.twitter.com/RSroYWeubH
— WWE (@WWE) July 7, 2026
It’s been a minute since Raw opened with a chaotic scene that wasn’t just a pull-apart brawl in the ring.
Monday night, Sami Zayn arrived in full celebration mode, waving his WWE Championship around and reveling in being the guy. He quickly ran into Cody Rhodes and couldn’t resist running him down in that backhanded manner that has become Sami's calling card.
Cody handled it deftly, but he quickly found himself on the receiving end of a Gunther sneak attack, with the Ring General quickly powerbombing him through a table. The Austrian got in Sami’s face, calling him a disgrace and a fluke of a champion before slamming a car door on Rhodes’ head to make sure he was taken out of action.
Just like that, Gunther re-established himself as a serious threat for the world title and threw the Raw main event into jeopardy. In reality, this was also a clever booking strategy, as it absolved WWE from delivering a Cody/Sami match where fans very well might have turned on both wrestlers because neither hails from Chicago.
2. Chicago Magic
Two years ago, CM Punk appeared as the rolling doors of the Allstate Arena opened, bloodied, and carried into the arena by Drew McIntyre in the midst of their vicious feud.
Monday night, Punk once again was revealed as those doors opened, but this time he was the conquering hero, returning to WWE for the first time in nearly three months to challenge Sami Zayn for the Undisputed WWE Championship as a replacement for Cody Rhodes.
Punk and Zayn unsurprisingly had an excellent match, countering and stealing each other’s moves and battling through this impromptu world title fight. Sami repeatedly blocked Punk’s bulldog attempts and hit two Go-to-Sleeps of his own, to no avail. Punk managed to counter a Helluva Kick with an Exploder, then “dodged” (the one botch) a Zayn Helluva, hit his own, and finished Sami with a GTS.
Fantastic piece of booking here, delivering the cliché Punk return in Chicago but making it a truly satisfying piece of booking.
1. About That Booking…
WWE potentially booked themselves into a corner at Night of Champions by having Sami Zayn win the Undisputed WWE Championship when they had no intention of him walking into SummerSlam with the title.
Having Cody Rhodes beat him for the title so quickly risked alienating the American Nightmare with fans, considering Sami’s long journey to finally capture the title. It would have been the third time in the past year that Rhodes lost the title, only to win it back from the same person who beat him (John Cena and Drew McIntyre were the others).
Instead, Cody gained sympathy after being attacked by Gunther to open the show. Sami got to play the disingenuous “last real good guy” reacting to Rhodes being declared unable to compete. And then CM Punk played the returning hometown hero, leaning on the lore of a summertime world title match in Chicago and daring fans to believe that lightning could strike twice.
Punk taking the title off Zayn as an unannounced challenger fit his comments on the Raw after WrestleMania 42, when he said that he just had to “stay ready, because you never know when a championship opportunity is just gonna fall out of the sky.”
And for Sami, losing his prized title after a nonstop, over-the-top celebration in a match where he couldn’t adequately prepare will only fuel his paranoia, potentially sending him over the edge into full-blown heel.
Lastly, this arrives at a world title scene that involves Punk as champion, Cody as the former champ looking for revenge at SummerSlam, Zayn as another former champ buzzing around, and Gunther as an assassin on the side looking to fight his way back into the title picture. That’s about the best that the WWE Championship scene has looked in quite some time.