8 Ups And 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Oct 31)

3. Jobbing Full-Timers To Part-Timers

Goldberg Rusev
WWE.com

This is a tough item to write, because you have to take into consideration different factors. But generally speaking, making your full time wrestlers job and get beaten down by part-timers is just a horrible strategy from a long-term business standpoint.

To be fair, Goldberg needs to re-establish himself somewhat, and having him beat up a current wrestler to show he’s still got it isn’t a terrible thing. Destroying Rusev, who recently held the same United States Championship Goldberg did in WCW, might have made sense in the moment, but it just makes an in-his-prime Rusev look impotent and secondary to 49-year-old Goldberg.

This is a problem that has plagued WWE in recent years. Whether it’s Undertaker, or Brock Lesnar, or The Rock, WWE has sacrificed full time wrestlers to these guys and made their main roster look like a bunch of midcard, win-trading geeks, rather than the superstars who will be main-eventing WrestleMania XL (40) when those part-timers from the 90s and 2000s can’t go anymore.

Rusev and Goldberg aren’t the problem, but they’re the most recent example of the issue.

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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.