5 Ups And 8 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Feb 27)

3. Building Toward… What?

neville jack gallagher
WWE.com

One of the downsides of having a major PPV just five weeks away in the form of WrestleMania XXXIII is that everything else can easily be overshadowed. And that is exactly what happened Monday night.

Despite Raw being the go-home show for Fastlane, the episode dragged with little excitement, save for a couple segments, and really served to mostly fill the three-hour timeslot. Truthfully, if you watched the first 15 minutes and the last half-hour, you would have gotten more than enough about the three big matches (Kevin Owens/Goldberg, Roman Reigns/Braun Strowman, Samoa Joe/Sami Zayn). The rest of the episode was basically skippable.

Raw not only didn’t really generate a lot of excitement for Fastlane, but it flew in a holding pattern as far as Mania’s concerned. Sure, things will likely move forward after the PPV, but it still felt like a wasted episode Monday night. And that’s never a good thing.

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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.