4 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (March 14)

5. New Champ Looks Like Geek

Damian Priest Finn Balor
WWE.com

Just in case you thought that winning the United States Championship meant that WWE now viewed Finn Balor as an upper-tier guy, Monday night set everyone straight.

Balor battled former champ Damian Priest Monday night, with Austin Theory ringside on commentary. Finn and Priest had a decent back-and-forth, but just as he was headed up for the Coup de Grace, Theory provided a distraction. Balor kept going, but then bailed out of the ring to dropkick Theory and take him out. Then he wandered back into the ring… and straight into a Reckoning for the clean loss.

Afterwards, Theory (who’s wrestling an announcer at WrestleMania 38) laid out Balor with an ATL and took a selfie with the falling US champ.

They could have booked this in a way that Balor didn’t get laid out twice in 30 seconds, or at least that he was overcome by the odds, not an idiot who let himself get distracted. But WWE can only book one way, and that way was to make Finn look weak.

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.