8 Ups & 3 Downs From WWE Raw After WrestleMania 40 (8 April - Results & Review)

2. It Says ‘Sports Entertainment’ On The Marquee

WWE Raw Jade Cargill Chelsea Green
WWE

The Raw after WrestleMania rarely is about match quality, but up until the last 20 minutes on Monday night, the show was being carried by a 45-minute promo and a tag match. Most of everything else was either “pretty good” or “meh”.

That doesn’t make for a bad Raw at all, but it didn’t help that four of the six matches were just there, including two that featured current NXT Champions, and a third that highlighted one of the company’s biggest new stars, Jade Cargill.

It’s difficult to describe what really is a feeling. There’s no tangible way to say it beyond that everything that happened after the show-opening promo until Sami Zayn came out ranged from acceptable to groan-inducing.

The Raw after WrestleMania in a post-Vince McMahon world should have felt electric from beginning to end, and this seemed to nosedive after Cody Rhodes and The Rock, and only really reached a solid high again in the final hour. Thankfully for WWE, the opening and closing of the show was great stuff, so this criticism is likely muted in most people’s eyes.

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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.