7 Ups And 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Sept 19)

Ups...

7. Cagey Strategy

roman reigns kevin owens
WWE.com

Leave it to Michael Cole to ask the question of whether Kevin Owens was acting cowardly when he tried to immediately exit the steel cage after the bell rang in his match against Roman Reigns.

Corey Graves, who 90% of the time is awesome on commentary (when he doesn’t have someone yelling in his ear), smartly pointed out that it was a brilliant strategy because the point of the match is that you win by pinfall, submission or escape. It doesn’t matter if you have a 20-minute match or a 20-second one. Escape and you win, period. And as has been noted, KO has a title match in six days, so why risk getting hurt in a cage match with no stakes?

It was a small detail that you don’t see all too often in these cage matches – the heel trying to avoid the match altogether and attempting to escape immediately. It would be kind of funny to see that actually work once, just so the heel could point to his head about how smart he was.

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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.