5 Ups & 7 Downs For WWE Raw (8 Sept - Results & Review)

1. Stale Main Event Scene

Oh look, it’s another Raw main event featuring some combination of members of The Vision squaring off against a combo of LA Knight/Jey Uso/CM Punk/Penta! That’s new, fresh, and exciting…

For the seventh consecutive week (and 10th in 11 weeks), Raw was main-evented by some combination of those wrestlers, battling in matches that mostly ended in disqualifications, had shenanigan finishes, or were booked as no-DQ matches in the first place. That’s a run that stretches back to 23 June, when Cody Rhodes defeated Jey in the King of the Ring tournament.

(The outlier match in that run? Iyo Sky versus Stephanie Vaquer on 23 July, which ended in a no contest.)

What makes this main event scene more monotonous is that the matches tend to follow the same pattern: the outcome is irrelevant, but The Vision will oftentimes put the faces down in the aftermath with a series of spears and tsunamis. Only two of these 10 matches actually carried stakes: a World Heavyweight Championship match between Knight and Seth Rollins (ended in a DQ) and the world title gauntlet match Punk won.

Otherwise, it’s a meaningless crush of 15-20 minute matches where the outcome is secondary, the beatdowns are mandatory, and everything resets after Raw ends.