4 Ups & 8 Downs From WWE Raw (May 30)

Rhodes, Rollins sell HIAC, Raw women's title feud sputters, bad booking galore.

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WWE.com

If you thought WWE was going to head into a PLE by putting their collective best foot forward on Raw Monday night, you must be new here.

WWE in the span of one hour showed us that they simultaneously know exactly how to perfectly build a feud and deliver a go-home segment to sell a match, and how to just throw content out there to fill time and call it a brilliant closing sell for a major match.

Cody Rhodes and Seth Rollins talked people in the door with their segment, but the Raw Women’s Championship match might as well have just been a repeat of what’s been said before, summed up to four minutes, which would have saved us 25 minutes of our lives.

Beyond that, Raw was barely competent. If not for the sheer willpower of Kevin Owens and the Street Profits in separate segments, this would have been a true one-trick pony, an all-time dud of a show. And again, this is heading into Hell in a Cell, with all six announced matches being Raw contests, and right after an AEW PPV, where wrestling fans’ attention might be turned up a bit. That’s just proof that WWE isn’t really treating this as much more than a middling show.

Let’s get to it…

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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.