8 Ups and 7 Downs From WWE Raw (June 27)

by Scott Carlson

1. Taboo Talk

seth rollins raw tweet
WWE.com

After a week of wondering how WWE would address the wellness policy suspension of Roman Reigns, the company went right for it Monday night and didn’t pull any punches.

Seth Rollins opened Raw and almost immediately “went off script” and decided to talk about Roman, shrugging his shoulders and acknowledging that he wasn’t supposed to talk about him, but it was live TV and he had a mic. Rollins proceeded to run Reigns down as an embarrassment to him as the Architect of the Shield, then mocked Roman’s Twitter apology. He also tried to have Roman removed from the Battleground triple threat title match.

Give WWE credit for trying something different. It’s not normal to acknowledge a wellness policy violation in a storyline, especially in this manner. By having Rollins call him out (and Stephanie later call him out as well), WWE set the stage for the heels to be opposed to his actions, while faces like Dean Ambrose were willing to forgive him.

Considering the alternatives were to ignore Roman for four weeks or run an injury angle off-screen, this was a strange but effective resolution. It won’t work every time, but it seemed to work this time.

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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.