2. Horrible Finishes
When the card for Raw was unveiled, you knew there had to be some screwy finishes given that some of these matchups could take place on an upcoming PPV. You dont want to give away every match for free when you can draw people in with an inconclusive ending and have them pay to see the finale. But you also cant overdo those types of finishes. WWE had this problem after the Attitude Era, when they had to retrain fans to enjoy actual matches with actual endings. What we got instead on Monday night was a series of terrible finishes to lackluster matches. Nearly every match had some type of screwy finish: a DQ (Roman Reigns/Big Show), distractions (Natalya/Nikki Bella; Usos and Naomi/Miz, Mizdow and Alicia Fox), dueling refs (Luke Harper/Erick Rowan), interference (Adam Rose/Big E) and bait-and-switch (Dolph Ziggler/Bad News Barrett; Ryback/Seth Rollins and Kane). How that encourages casual fans to tune in is unclear. And how it encourages longtime fans to continue to watch also is baffling. WWE, we can accept someone losing cleanly and then winning later. Losing cleanly doesnt automatically taint a wrestler, so you dont need to protect everyone through screwy finishes and 50/50 booking.
Scott Carlson
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.
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