6 Ups And 8 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (March 14th)

Mick, Taker, Brock and Trips on Raw? What went wrong?

by Scott Carlson

How on Earth could a Raw featuring Mick Foley, Undertaker, Brock Lesnar, Triple H, Shane McMahon and R-Truth in a penguin costume possibly be bad? If you don€™t know the answer, then you haven€™t been watching WWE for the past year or so. WWE could take lemons, sugar, water and a pitcher and still couldn€™t make lemonade.

Raw had some good moments Monday night, but it missed the mark on nearly every major angle it went for. Undertaker versus Shane fell way flat. Roman Reigns€™ big return was met with a John Cena-like response, only quieter. Dolph Ziggler stood up to the Authority and got beaten down. Oh, and Jacqueline is now a WWE Hall of Famer.

This has got to be worrying for WWE officials, less than three weeks out from WrestleMania. The company put on a Network special event, Roadblock, that featured a main event that many fans were looking forward to more than the Mania main event, with Dean Ambrose standing in for his buddy Reigns. It€™s clear that WWE has perception issues among its fanbase, but it€™s also clear that the company isn€™t willing (or able) to change course this time (as they have for Mania the past two years).

There obviously is always time to make a course correction or two, but it€™s getting tougher to get legitimately excited for WrestleMania, especially when the top three matches feature four part-timers and only one of those matches is really capturing fans€™ imaginations. But first, we have to get through this episode of Raw.

So what stood tall and what was left battered and bloody? Let€™s get to it

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.