6 Ups And 9 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Feb 18)

There are a half-dozen questions surrounding Triple H’s announcement that four top NXT superstars would debut on Raw Monday night, such as whether this is permanent or one night only.

But if it wasn’t for those four wrestlers – Ricochet, Aleister Black, Johnny Gargano and Tommaso Ciampa – Raw would have been a complete dog of a show Monday. The NXT upstarts provided the jolt to the red brand after a lackluster Elimination Chamber PPV. It made Raw a lot more interesting, but it also left us one week closer to the next PPV with nothing set up or even cued up.

That’s not good, especially with WrestleMania less than seven weeks away. We need to start getting things rolling a bit, and this episode would have been ideal to at least set the table for Fastlane. Instead, the focus was on the debuting NXT wrestlers and a Ronda Rousey/Ruby Riott rematch from the night before… when Rousey squashed Riott in two minutes.

But hey, we’re on the Road to WrestleMania, where almost anything could potentially and plausibly happen. *sigh*

WWE needs to find their weak links in the writing staff and can them quickly, because the writing is brutal and is actively hurting the product. For now though, we’ll just have to enjoy what we got Monday night

Let’s get to it…