4 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (6 Jul - Results & Review)

4. Delivering Money Matches Too Soon?

WWE Raw CM Punk Sami Zayn
WWE

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.

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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.