6 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (Aug 31)

Ups…

6. Finding Its Footing?

Jessamyn Duke
WWE.com

Raw Underground has been a total mixed bag since its debut. The WWE version of Fight Club has been good for providing a different visual during a long three-hour program. But it just doesn’t click within the WWE universe the way the company wants it to.

The fight club works when it takes wrestlers like Riddick Moss, Jessamyn Duke and Marina Shafir and lets them brawl and beat up opponents, serving as a way to introduce them to the audience without having to wrestle 20 matches against Natalya or Mustafa Ali. It also could work to reintroduce/reinvent established wrestlers like Titus O’Neil.

However, dragging Raw angles into the Underground doesn’t really work. Having the Hurt Business and Apollo Crews, Cedric Alexander & Ricochet go into the club to continue their battles just feels dumb. One minute they’re wrestling, using springboards and dropkicks, and the next they’re utilizing MMA-style techniques and brawling in a ropeless ring.

Raw Underground as a ways to go before we can say it works, but stuff like the fights with Moss, Duke and Shafir could work. Just figure that stuff out and add some stakes to the matches and you might have something. For this week, we’ll give a tacit “up.”

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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.