7 Ups And 5 Downs From WWE Raw (Dec 16)

1. So, What Was The Point?

Humberto Carillo Karl Anderson
WWE.com

Gauntlet matches, when booked well and chock full of good wrestlers, can be highly entertaining and a great way to move along storylines while providing quality in-ring action.

Monday’s gauntlet contest for a United States Championship title shot was really well constructed, with Ricochet really shining for much of the match before Humberto Carrillo grabbed the spotlight in a really good penultimate match, leading to a rematch between he and Andrade.

And then Andrade jumped Humberto from behind and attacked him viciously, seemingly setting himself up to pick the bones and earn an easy US title match. But suddenly, Andrade tossed him to the floor, pulled up a mat and hit a hammerlock DDT on the concrete, ending things as a no-contest.

So we just sat through an hourlong gauntlet match to name a #1 contender for the US title, and they pulled the plug just like that? And then they went and gave a US title shot to Seth Rollins, negating the entire purpose of the match.

Seriously, what the hell? Everything was going great until they pulled the rug out. And doing all of that after fans sat there for an hour just really made it worse.

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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.