5 Ups And 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (April 2)

3. Going Home?

heath slater elias samson
WWE.com

Really, this was the go-home Raw before WrestleMania?

The last Raw before a major PPV can be a mixed bag. If the storylines are all tied up, then WWE is wise to follow a Hippocratic Oath and do no harm. If there are some loose ends, then the goal is to tie them up so everything is ready.

But above all else, the biggest goal is to drive enthusiasm for the PPV. And while this is WrestleMania and there are a lot of huge matches on the card, it really felt like the build for just another PPV. Maybe that’s a function of having watched and dissected these episodes for years now, but it just didn’t feel like a huge deal.

Yes, we all know it has the potential to be an epic event, but the go-home Raw didn’t really hype it up any more than it already was. If Undertaker had showed up, then this would be a lot different. If Braun announced a huge surprise partner like Goldberg, that might have worked. But everything we knew coming out of Raw we mostly knew going into it.

Still looking forward to Sunday though…

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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.