7 Ups And 7 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Nov 9)
Downs...
7. Romans A Goody-Goody
Will someone remind WWEs creative team that people like Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Rock occasionally cheated in their matches and still were cheered like crazy? When was the Rock booed mercilessly? When he was a smiling, virtuous babyface. None of that is to suggest that Roman Reigns is a smiling, upstanding babyface, but you can already see hes going to have a difficult path to the finals, slugging it out with Big Show and having to trade blows next week with Cesaro. First, Roman professed that hes not a sellout and that he would earn his title shot again, then he fought from underneath his entire match against Show, pulling out the win in the final seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mHTbiubFHM Now, this could all be forgiven if Roman ultimately gives in to temptation at the end, but if this is one big story arc to paint Reigns as a virtuous hero who overcomes the odds to win the title, then WWE is ignoring its own history and is mistakenly trying to book Reigns as if hes Daniel Bryan. For right now, this will get a cautious down until proven otherwise.
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.
