7 Ups & 10 Downs From WWE Raw (Sep 27)

1. Bait And Wait

New Day Hurt Business
WWE.com

Clearly, WWE is trying to draw viewers in at the beginning of Raw and then retain them for the entire three hours.

Rather than booking a solid show from top to bottom with a series of matches to open, close and fill the middle, they instead decided to deliver their biggest match right away… sort of, and then run it back 2.5 hours later.

Big E versus Bobby Lashley for the WWE Championship opened Raw and went through the motions of a pretty decent title match, only for things to break down when New Day brawled with the reunited Hurt Business in the ring, leading to a DQ (which also came after Lashley nailed a spear and quite possibly was going to win).

This led Adam Pearce to declare they’d restart the match later as a cage match, which was a cop-out and a cheap way to keep fans invested. If you wanted to do this, open with an in-ring promo that sees Shelton Benjamin and Cedric Alexander reunite with Lashley, beat down Big E, New Day saves, Pearce makes the main event a cage match to head off the potential interference.

But then we wouldn’t have a title match to open and close Raw, apparently.

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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.