7 Ups And 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Jan 23)

4. Roman Reigns Supreme

Roman Reigns Chris Jericho
WWE.com

The past two weeks, Roman Reigns has had his hat handed to him by Chris Jericho and Kevin Owens, lending itself to the need for the shark cage for Y2J at the Royal Rumble.

And then on Monday, Reigns overcame a 2-on-1 assault to stand tall, smile and laugh after tapping Owens in the shark cage (and having it hoisted up high) and spearing Jericho. Just like that, Roman was portrayed as single-handedly toppling Raw’s top two singles champions. One shouldn’t be a problem on Sunday.

It isn’t that Reigns didn’t get beat down three weeks in a row. He probably needed to get a matter of retribution. But WWE loves to have its key guys always look strong, and if they show weakness one week, they get it right back the next. That’s what happened here.

Maybe the better route would’ve been for Reigns and Jericho not to fight on Monday and instead Roman interferes in a Jericho match against someone like Sami Zayn or even Curtis Axel and costs him the match to get even. That would have at least been something different.

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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.