7 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (13 Feb - Results & Review)

Cody and Sami steal the show... together! Street Profits stumble, Judgment Day rises.

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WWE.com

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Monday Night Raw continued on its road to WrestleMania with an overall good but uneven program that saw the show hit several massive highs while also producing several easily skippable segments.

Such is the life of a three-hour program where they add more and more stuff that clearly isn’t fully baked, leaving Raw feeling like it’s overstuffed with half-cooked ideas.

Consider the Cody Rhodes/Sami Zayn segment, a daring move that succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. It was bookended by a Piper Niven/Mia Yim match that played out to silence and an abbreviated Baron Corbin interview before it, and a bizarre and ultimately useless women’s backstage segment immediately afterward.

It feels like peak-valley-peak-valley with Raw some weeks, like an inability to maintain momentum throughout the show for more than two consecutive segments. The result is your faithful reviewer saying it was “uneven” but overall enjoyable because the positives are so good, while the negatives are rarely on the level they were a couple years ago.

Raw is rolling toward the Elimination Chamber event this weekend, with Mania looming. Several matches are in the works, and we could see some nice peaks in the coming weeks. But don’t expect that pitch-perfect program in the next seven weeks. This is more or less what we’re getting.

Let’s get to it…

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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.