7 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Raw (Aug 15)

2. Announcer Stupidity

Bayley's stable
WWE.com

The announcing during the Dakota Kai/Dana Brooke was so pronouncedly bad that it had to be on purpose. Otherwise, it marked a true low point in recent weeks.

Jimmy Smith and Byron Saxton took up the position that Dana Brooke was a “veteran” defending the locker room against Kai and her cohorts, which led Corey Graves to turn on the snark as he pointed out that Dakota “has wrestled significantly longer” than Brooke. Saxton tried to say that she hadn’t been in WWE as long as Dana, which again garnered Graves’ ire.

Smith even tried to point out that Kai was “not showing nerves in her first singles match on Raw,” to which Corey deadpanned that “it’s not her first day of school.”

If this was a deliberate attempt to call out how stupid this WWE mentality of anything that happens outside the company really is, then that’s fine, but this was a horrible way to go about breaking that wall down. It just made 2/3 of the booth sound like morons and completely overshadowed the match.

But if this was a continuation of the house style for WWE and Graves was simply being contrarian, then that’s a bigger problem.

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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.