6 Ups & 2 Downs For WWE Raw (20 Oct - Results & Review)

1. Rushing Right Along

There are two schools of thought when it comes to dealing with a world title vacancy: crown a new champ as quickly as possible, or put together a longer story arc that culminates in a crowning achievement for a wrestler.

Raw GM Adam Pearce stripped Seth Rollins of the title Monday night and immediately announced a battle royal to name a top contender, who would face CM Punk (who won a number one contender’s match last week) at Saturday Night’s Main Event next week – less than two weeks of turnaround for the title match and minimal build.

The battle royal itself contained really only two plausible winners: Jey Uso and LA Knight, with Dominik Mysterio as a fun decoy. The rest of the field included midcarders (Rusev, Penta, Sheamus) and tag wrestlers (Ivar, Kofi Kingston, Alpha Academy, Judgment Day, new tag champs AJ Styles and Dragon Lee). It was a joke of a match.

Rather than rushing a battle royal like this forward, they could have booked a small tournament, with Punk already a finalist, but the title match would be pushed back to Survivor Series, which is five weeks-plus away. (For comparison, the WWF World Heavyweight Championship was vacant for seven weeks in 1988 between The Main Event and WrestleMania IV.)

This would have allowed for an eight-man tourney to play out and still leave two weeks of build between Punk and the winner. (They could have also booked a situation with Punk getting a bye to the semifinals if they wanted him to “earn” this title match.)

Instead, we’re going to crown a new champ by next weekend with one episode to build the match. On the plus side, it definitely will add gravity to SNME, which has felt like filler most of the time. But this also threatens not to feel like a serious world title match due to the suddenness of it.