9 Burning Questions For WWE Raw (July 18th)
Did you know there's a draft coming up? Who will be the new GMs?
It’s the last Monday Night Raw before everything changes forever… also known as the WWE brand extension
draft, which will take place the following night on Smackdown Live.
As much sarcastic hyperbole as that intro had, things really will change after Monday. We’ll have two distinct rosters for the first time in nearly five years, with talent being exclusive to either Raw or Smackdown. That means that if you typically don’t watch Smackdown (due to work commitments or you just don’t have five hours to dedicate to watching WWE programming each week) and your favorite wrestler (say, Kevin Owens) is drafted to the blue brand, then you have a choice: Watch both shows, switch and only watch Smackdown, or say goodbye to KO for the time being.
All of this comes the week before a B-PPV, Battleground. And despite being considered a secondary special event (with SummerSlam the following month), the card is shaping up to be a pretty strong one, with the former Shield members vying for the WWE Championship, the Club getting John Cena and Enzo Amore & Big Cass, and Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens upping their rivalry.
But first, we’ve got to get through the end of an era on Raw. So let’s take a look at the big questions that need to be answered Monday…
9. What Draft News Will Come Up?
WWE made news Sunday when they put rules for Tuesday’s draft
up on WWE.com.
We now know who has the first pick (Raw and Stephanie McMahon), that Raw gets three picks to Smackdown’s two (corresponding to hours on TV), tag teams count as one pick, and six NXT superstars will be drafted. Those are some pretty specific rules, and kudos to WWE for actually laying them out there in advance of the draft rather than allow speculation to run rampant. For example, the announcers had spent weeks talking about tag teams possibly being broken up, and now that doesn’t look like it’ll happen.
But if WWE is announcing rules for the draft already, is it possible that we could have more news coming Monday night (besides naming the two GMs for the shows)? Perhaps we’ll get a snippet of new news on Raw.