7 Ups And 5 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (April 23)

3. Roman The Minimalist

Roman Reigns Brock Lesnar
WWE.com

It’s fine if WWE is trying to downplay Roman Reigns and reduce his mic time to cut down on opportunities for crowds to turn on him. That’s smart.

After all, what made him popular with the Shield in the first place was his quiet intensity. But that’s not what we got Monday night.

Reigns came down to ringside to confront Brock Lesnar, slowly walking down to the ring and climbing inside. After being silent for a couple minutes, he simply noted that he was coming home with the WWE Universal Championship, and we could “believe that.”

And that was it.

There’s minimal, and then there’s, “Where’s the rest?” Roman showed little fire or intensity, just looking at Brock and stating what he was going to do matter-of-factly. This just didn’t jibe with Paul Heyman’s rant earlier. And that’s what really set it off. It was too calm.

Yes, some are going to say this is just nitpicking Reigns, but we’ve seen him do intense plenty of times, and this was a perfect time to use some verbal force in a short burst, and we got none of that. By comparison, watch Samoa Joe’s 30-second promo video and see what a short burst of intensity looks like.

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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.