6 Ups And 7 Downs From WWE Elimination Chamber 2019

2. Raw With PPV Main Event

ronda rousey ruby riott
WWE.com

That’s about the best way to describe Elimination Chamber: an episode of Raw with a PPV main event tacked on at the end.

Seriously, look at everything between the two chamber matches: a Raw Women’s Championship squash that served as a setup for an angle advancement (and a really good one at that); a paint-by-numbers Intercontinental Championship handicap match; a lackluster SmackDown Tag Team Championship match; and a godawful Baron Corbin snoozefest against Braun Strowman, who lost after massive interference.

None of that screams “PPV-quality material,” but that’s what we got. The women’s chamber match was fine, and the men’s chamber match was really, really good. But everything else could have been moved to Monday and no one would have blinked.

We get that on the Road to WrestleMania, the two PPVs after Royal Rumble are afterthoughts to some extent, but holy crap that was bad. Match quality aside, we’ll note some positives about the outcomes of these bouts where appropriate.

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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.