8 Ups And 6 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (Dec 17)

5. Last-Minute Gauntlet Match

Quick question: If the entire Raw women’s division wasn’t vying for a title shot and Stephanie hadn’t booked an eight-woman gauntlet match, what would have occupied the final hour of Raw Monday night?

It’s a strange thing about WWE with how they “book” Raw as the show progresses. We’re to believe that the show literally is booked by the authority figures as it unfolds, sometimes at the person’s whim. And while the trope of sending two arguing wrestlers out to the ring to settle their differences is fine, seeing a huge gauntlet match booked to eat up the last hour like that just felt really forced.

This could have been a really neat thing to announce as Raw opened or during the show, not make it look like a snap decision to Ronda Rousey’s open challenge. Raw would have built to this gauntlet match: the seeding, the strategy involved, etc. Instead, we just dove right in.

It wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but it just hit you as you realized midway through that this was the entire last hour of the program