9 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Raw (21 April - Results & Review)

1. Baking A Cake Without Flour Or Eggs

John Cena’s World Heavyweight Championship celebration Monday night provided fans with not only his next opponent, it offered them a countdown of sorts.

Cena revealed that when 2025 began, he had 36 dates planned for WWE. He ticked off nine of them, leaving 27 appearances – not matches – before his in-ring career ends in December. Cena repeated that as the “last real undisputed champion” of WWE, he planned to retire the title when his career ends, thus setting the stage for the quest for the entire roster: dethrone Cena so he can’t retire the championship with him.

But Cena also claimed he didn’t even need to wrestle during the year to meet his obligations; he just needed to show up and talk. And that’s where this story hits a bit of a wall. How is he going to pull this off, not defending the title? Wrestlers have been stripped of championships plenty of times before. Perhaps a higher-up in WWE will allow him to do this, but why would this figure want to ruin his own company?

This is where the “ruin wrestling” story seemingly falls apart. Unless and until The Rock returns, there is no vehicle to make this plausible. Besides, Cena’s a heel. What’s stopping him from trying to blitz through all 27 appearances by showing up at NXT, Raw, and SmackDown for two months? Is a GM or Triple H himself going to make Cena defend the title?

This might be overthinking everything, but WWE just knocked its biggest star off his pedestal in a widely panned WrestleMania main event, so the company’s next steps with Cena and the title should be clear and make more sense. There’s actual potential here, but until they get untracked and put the pieces together for the biggest angle they have for their main title, this is going to receive criticism.

We’re missing a couple of key ingredients here. Put them together, straight the story out, and then it could be off to the races.