4 Ups And 8 Downs From WWE Raw (Feb 14)

6. Even KO Can’t Elevate Material

WWE Raw Kevin Owens
WWE.com

Really good wrestlers can elevate decent material to be great, or turn bad material into something passable. But even the best struggle to elevate utter crap into something watchable.

Kevin Owens has done his level best to turn dismal writing into something viewable in recent weeks, but his efforts fell short Monday night, when he responded to a poll that said he was lying when he said he loved Texas. KO admitted he was lying last week, but that he was telling the truth Monday when he said he hated Texas – and Indianapolis (where Raw emanated) – and then ran down Texas for being a bunch of “redneck morons with a Texas draw.”

It was a really basic, cringey promo that felt like Heel 101, not the words of a master promo artist. Calling Texas the a** of North America wasn’t terrible, but it was the best line in a bad segment that still left things unsolved: The entire story originally was that Owens might be left off the WrestleMania 38 card, and now KO’s desperation gave way to just outright insulting the host state.

It was embarrassingly bad stuff. Even if it’s leading somewhere big, the material was just bad, childish stuff. Owens is capable of better than this, and hopefully we’ll see that in the coming weeks, proving this was bad material, nothing more.

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.