7 Ups And 8 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (June 17)

1. Wasting A Marquee Matchup

Seth Rollins Daniel Bryan Raw
WWE.com

After spending three hours reminding us how WWE Universal Champion Seth Rollins has never beaten five-time former world champ Daniel Bryan, the two went out and had a solid Raw main event, which ended with Rollins defeating Bryan for the first time.

Why? The match was fine, but why in the blue hell would you burn this matchup and potential storyline like this? The announcers kept playing it up as giving Rollins – who had spent the entire show demolishing everyone with a steel chair – momentum. Yep, Rollins needed momentum to face the dynamo that is Baron Corbin.

So Bryan and his perfect record against Rollins was sacrificed to further the Rollins/Corbin feud. This wouldn’t be a problem normally, but given the Wild Card Rule, they could have easily programmed Bryan into a feud with Rollins down the road using the fact he was undefeated against Seth as a selling point.

But no, let’s toss that aside to bolster that red-hot feud with the laid-off Olive Garden waiter.

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Contributor
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.