7 Ups & 3 Downs from WWE Raw (19 May - Results & Review)

1. World Title Permutations

Last week, Gunther all but telegraphed that Jey Uso will successfully defend his World Heavyweight Championship against Logan Paul at Saturday Night’s Main Event. Monday, WWE seemed to go for an overcorrection, but it worked in a way they might not have intended.

Paul opened Raw by talking about how he was going to beat Jey this weekend and become a world champion, which drew out Gunther for an interesting verbal confrontation that made the Ring General the default babyface. Gunther buttered Logan up before warning him that, should Paul win the title, it would rob Gunther of the privilege of taking the title off Uso, and he would take that personally.

Later, Paul ran into Seth Rollins backstage, who reminded him that while Gunther would challenge the winner of Saturday’s championship match, Rollins would be waiting for the next title shot. Paul Heyman stressed the same thing to Jey backstage: regardless of whether Uso, Paul, or Gunther has the title after June 9, the World Heavyweight Championship will come back to Rollins afterward.

And still later, Rollins confronted Gunther with a warning, with the Ring General all but laughing it off and welcoming the possibility of facing Seth.

Those four segments allowed fans to speculate on several different permutations of title bouts the next couple of months. Paul versus Gunther or Logan versus Rollins aren’t on anyone’s radar, but they dangled them out there Monday, along with Gunther versus Rollins as a curiosity.

While none of those are dream matches by any stretch, the very fact WWE is planting any kind of seeds with their secondary world title is a good thing.