6 Ups And 7 Downs From WWE Raw (July 6)

Ups...

6. Finally, Some Passion

One of the accusations lobbed at Dolph Ziggler in recent years has been how stale his character has been – and he clearly knows it. But even being the challenger of the month, he still is capable of rising to the occasion, and on Monday, he showed it a little better.

Ziggler came out to announce the stipulation for his WWE Championship match against Drew McIntyre at Extreme Rules, but immediately demurred, saying that “it’s a secret” and he’s keeping the stip to himself to maintain an advantage. Honestly, that’s about as good of a strategy as anything else, though it also opens the door to a huge letdown at the PPV if the stipulation is something lame like Falls Count Anywhere, Extreme Rules match, no DQ or some other tired “extreme” match type.

But Dolph also took a nice swipe at Drew about comparing resumes, noting that his “is bigger,” drawing attention to McIntyre being fired back in 2014. The two had a nice back-and-forth here that actually sounded like a real feud rather than the lame banter we’d previously seen.

That doesn’t mean we’re buying this as a PPV main event-caliber match, but it was at least an entertaining opening segment.