7 Ups & 6 Downs From WWE Raw (Dec 6)

1. Getting Cagey… But Why?

Big E Kevin Owens
WWE.com

So a night after NXT War Games and a night before NXT settles a mini-feud between Kyle O’Reilly and Von Wagner inside a steel cage, Raw opened with… a cage match between Big E and Kevin Owens.

Setting aside the overkill of steel cages on WWE programming in a 50-hour period, can anyone explain why this match was taking place, much less inside a steel cage? We saw KO and Big E battle last week in the Raw main event, with Owens winning via DQ because Seth Rollins got involved. Then the next match on Raw (Monday’s opener) pitted the same two against each other again, this time in a cage, as a preview for next month’s triple threat at Day 1.

None of this made sense. This wasn’t an end to a feud. It wasn’t a title match. It wasn’t sold as a means to keep interference to a minimum. It was a cage match for the sake of having a cage match.

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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.