9 Ups And 10 Downs From Last Night's WWE Raw (May 6 )

Ups...

9. Wild Card Not All That Wild

daniel bryan kofi kingston
WWE.com

How they got there was pretty silly, but the final idea was not all that crazy.

After SmackDown’s Roman Reigns, Daniel Bryan and Kofi Kingston all showed up on Raw without permission, Vince McMahon tried to play it off by deciding a new rule in the wake of the Superstar Shakeup: the Wild Card Rule (trademark pending).

Under the rule, three (or is it now four?) wrestlers from Raw could travel to SmackDown each week, and three (or four) SmackDown wrestlers could visit Raw each week. There’s no set rule on who could show up when, so there’s an air of unpredictability and some different one-time matchups we could get.

Considering where Raw and SmackDown’s ratings are, and that they still want/need to have separate rosters, this was about the best they could do with shaking things up and juicing the shows.

It’s not a perfect solution – writing better television and booking more logical and smart feuds like they’ve been doing in NXT for four years would be a solution – but it’s something, and it might work in the short term.

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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.