5 Ups & 9 Downs From WWE Raw (Fb 28)

Edge gets opponent, new champ crowned, TWO heel turns, Miz sucks life out of show.

Edge AJ Styles
WWE.com

Around this time of year, it gets harder and harder to grade Monday Night Raw. WWE seems to throw a ton of stuff at the wall in the hopes that enough sticks to make the show work as they rapidly try to book what is now a two-night extravaganza.

The result is a frenzied six-week period where they try to lay out a pretense for anywhere from 12-16 matches (possibly more) and weave various threads simultaneously. A skilled, careful company would find this challenging. For WWE, which struggles to just book a three-hour standalone episode of Raw every week, this means a lot of misses and some hits.

That’s what we got Monday night, as some feuds are heating up, but there were plenty of bumps along the way. Questionable booking continues to plague WWE, as they backed up similar character developments on this show. They continue to think “love” can be forced on someone and it’ll be funny/entertaining. They want to push a giant slug by having him beat a legitimately talented big man who has shown his skills on your programming.

But WWE also continues to build a couple of key feuds nicely, and they set up what could be a sleeper match of the night at Mania. So buckle up and let’s wade through everything tossed at the wall and see what stuck.

Let’s get to it…

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.