5 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (Aug 16)

Raw is RK-Bro; otherwise, dud of a show, including world and women's titles.

by Scott Carlson
Randy Orton Riddle
WWE

WWE rode its stallion and Viper pretty strongly on Monday night, and if you don’t enjoy the stylings of RK-Bro, the Raw definitely wasn’t your show. But if you were saving up for some RK-Bro merch, you enjoyed those segments, but still probably were disappointed in the rest of the program.

Raw just can’t figure out how to utilize the crowds, which should be energizing everything about the product. Instead, you have wrestlers who can’t concentrate when their friends are randomly being cut, with NXT wrestlers either getting cut, being sent to the main roster to be jobbed out and embarrassed, or fall victim to WWE’s new NXT edict of pushing younger, bigger goons.

Yeah, we got the latest in Karrion Kross’ sure-to-be disappointing main roster run, and Mansoor picked up a win to give his team an advantage for God knows what. That stuff gets a pass today as items that should be acknowledged but just feel so insignificant heading into SummerSlam.

Other than that, the abysmal booking of the women’s division continued, Lilly is still around, and Reggie loves using the park to practice his evasion techniques. Yeah, that’ll put butts in the seats.

With that said, let’s get to it…

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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.