6 Ups & 4 Downs For WWE Raw (28 July - Results & Review)

Punk finally fires up, Reigns and Uso meet their fate, women shine in party match.

WWE Raw Gunther CM Punk
WWE

If you’re trying to keep score with WWE Raw and determine if it was a good week, you need to go beyond the numbers.

Raw these days has fallen off from its high-water mark of late 2023 and early 2024. Even the episodes where they get much more “right” than “wrong,” the highs rarely match those of a year or two ago. The booking is less imaginative, and the wrestling has fallen off in some respects. There obviously are some exceptions to these generalizations, but it needs to be stated.

Monday’s offering did a lot right: They effectively built and plugged a handful of SummerSlam matches on the go-home Raw, generating more interest in the World Heavyweight Championship and Women’s Intercontinental Championship matches and the battle between the Samoan cousins and the Seth Riders.

But as good as the card for SummerSlam might look on paper, is it the hottest wrestling card of the summer? Do any of the matches feel seminal, generating a tremendous amount of buzz? WWE’s summer show very well might deliver this weekend and be an instant classic, but that’s not the trendline here.

Raw is a lot like this these days. Monday’s show hit a lot of the right notes and kept the missteps to a minimum – a workmanlike effort heading into WWE’s biggest show of the summer.

Let’s get to it…

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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.