7 Ups And 10 Downs From WWE Raw's Season Premiere (Sept 30)

8. New Announcers Need More Seasoning

Who the hell is Dio Maddin?

That’s not intended to be an insult to the former Brennan Williams, but WWE’s new Raw commentary team consists of play-by-play man Vic Joseph and analyst Maddin (with Jerry Lawler sitting in this week as well). Joseph has acquitted himself well on 205 Live and could grow into a solid voice of Raw in the coming months.

But Maddin, a wrestler who had three years of professional experience under his belt before joining 205 Live on commentary in September, is a relative unknown. In fact, he didn’t get his new wrestling name until this summer. Despite being in NXT for three years, he never made it to TV.

None of that should disqualify him from being a commentator, but when you think about a color analyst, you think of some seasoned veteran. (Even Corey Graves, despite never being on the main roster, was a 14-year wrestler before he retired in NXT.) So if Maddin wasn’t going to have a wealth of knowledge to draw on, you’d hope he’d be a special talent on the mic.

And while Maddin wasn’t bad, he wasn’t memorable in any way. Probably the best you could say is that he was better than Byron Saxton – in that he was far less annoying.

There’s room for him to grow, and honestly, both Dio and Joseph could have been thrown off by Lawler’s atrocious performance, so we’ll give this a mild “down” here, fully acknowledging that they could gel and be a good team in short order.