5 Ups & 8 Downs From WWE Raw (May 3)

4. Spoiling Your Big Match

Drew McIntyre Braun Strowman
WWE.com

If you want a good example of how a three-hour Raw forced WWE to make dumb decisions, look no further than them splitting up the PPV triple threat for the WWE Championship into two singles matches over two weeks.

Raw opened with Adam Pearce flipping a coin to see whether Braun Strowman or Drew McIntyre would face Bobby Lashley in a non-title match on Monday, with the other man facing the champ next week. (Braun won the toss.) Throw in that Strowman and McIntyre had a singles match last week and you’ve got every possible permutation in the weeks leading up to the PPV, meaning there’s nothing really special to look forward to at WrestleMania Backlash, other than all three in the ring at the same time.

It just doesn’t make sense to give away every version of a PPV world title match lie this… unless you’ve got three hours to fill every week, like WWE does.

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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.