7 Ups And 9 Downs From WWE Extreme Rules 2018

4. Finally Acting Like A GM

No Mercy Brock Lesnar Paul Heyman
WWE.com

It’s been nearly three months since we last saw Brock Lesnar on WWE TV defending his Universal Championship, which normally would run afoul of the company’s selectively enforced “30-day defense” rule.

Instead, Brock has been written as a champ who does what he wants, when he wants. And that has left GM Kurt Angle and WWE leadership looking impotent by comparison. So it felt really good when Angle announced Sunday that Lesnar and Paul Heyman could either show up on Raw Monday night or agree to his next title defense, or be stripped of his title. Angle finally looked like a leader, laying down the law.

Truthfully, this is how things should have been moving for a while now. If they wanted to have a loophole to hold off on a serious opponent, they could have had Brock beat up a tomato can on Raw one night or even at Money in the Bank as a way to defend the title and avoid a real challenger.

But kudos for finally stepping up and acting like a GM.

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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.