5 Ups & 7 Downs From WWE Raw (July 5)

3. Everyone Loses

R-Truth wwe
WWE.com

If you were trying to find a winner in the segment involving Jaxson Ryker, Elias, R-Truth and Cedric Alexander, just stop now and give up.

Everyone is going to be deemed a loser here. R-Truth bailed on his tag partner to chase the 24/7 Championship, which is par for the course, so he gets a dispensation. But Alexander continued his slide into super-jobberdom as he took the pinfall in record time after Elias once again walked out on a match against Ryker.

And then there’s the entire 24/7 division that ran out to chase Akira Tozawa before the tag match, including Angel Garza (remember when he was getting spotlighted a month or so ago?), Humberto Carrillo (remember when he was treated as a serious challenger to Sheamus for the United States Championship), Drew Gulak, and Shelton Benjamin (who as we already mentioned is now a faceless drone instead of a guy with a history with another guy who was onscreen).

And Ryker? Yes, he won the match and WWE seems to be intent on pushing him somehow, but just wait a couple of weeks. If you think a live audience is going to cheer Jaxson Ryker as a face, Vince McMahon would like to clone you 20,000 times and have you fill every arena Raw appears in, because that’s the only way Ryker is getting cheered. He’ll be greeted with silence, and this push will be dead by SummerSlam.

So yes, everyone loses here.

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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.