7 Ups & 5 Downs From WWE Raw (8 May - Results & Review)

3. Impromptu A-Go-Go

It’s really a good thing superstars constantly get into backstage altercations during Raw, or else they’d never be able to fill the entire three-hour show.

On Monday night alone, three matches were made during Raw due to impromptu challenges. Imperium ran afoul of Kevin Owens & Sami Zayn, drawing an offer to meet them in the ring later. Zoey Stark was doing a backstage interview when she spied Nikki Cross talking to herself, leading the newcomer to call her a weirdo and challenge the Scot to a bout.

The worst offender had to be Xavier Woods, who was laughing with Akira Tozawa and inadvertently interrupted Rhea Ripley’s backstage interview. Dominik Mysterio bowed up to Woods, sparking a very lame exchange between the two before Ripley accepted a challenge on behalf of “Dom-Dom.”

Those three matches ran for a collective 20+ minutes, a significant amount of programming time.

You want to know how to avoid this? Stop making matches mid-show. Announce the card from the jump and then have the backstage confrontations happen “earlier” to explain how the matches came to be. All three of these situations would have worked using that method.

Instead, we’re left to believe that Raw went on the air with a gaping hole in production time that miraculously got filled by matchmaking superstars.