WWE Raw: 10 Things You Might Have Missed (May 30)

Monday's Memorial Day edition of Raw was built around one thing and one thing only: the long-awaited return of John Cena. Cena had suffered a shoulder injury during the first week of the year, and before that, he was out of action filming a television show. As such, this return marked his full-time comeback after just about seven months of inactivity.

The angle where Cena made his comeback delivered, but the rest of the show was, for the first time in many weeks, largely useless. The "new era" of WWE television has given the product a huge boost since WrestleMania - and last week's Raw, featuring five great matches for Money in the Bank slots, was possibly the apex - but they couldn't keep up the momentum forever. This week, the company proved that even the greatest roster it's ever assembled can't always make a three-hour wrestling show work.

With the brand split (and an increased focus on Smackdown) coming up, this raises some red flags - is the company equipped to handle five "A-level" hours of TV a week when three is still a problem? Will filling each show with half the available roster be even more difficult?

We still have a month and half before we get the answers to those questions. In the meantime, here are 10 things you may have missed from May 30's Raw:

Raw opened up with Shane and Stephanie McMahon addressing the WWE Universe about the huge news from last week - Smackdown is going live, each and every Tuesday evening.

That, of course, is the most superficial of the changes announced. The real news is that the brand split is coming back, and while the McMahons didn't mention that, The New Day did. The WWE Tag Team Champions expressed their concerns with the upcoming brand extension, and wanted to know if they'd end up split up. Of course, no answers were forthcoming, and the same was true when they asked who would run Smackdown.

The one thing that wasn't addressed in the segment, though, was the fact that WWE already had a brand extension, one that ran for nine years. That's a long time, and undoubtedly many of the fans who watch WWE today followed the product between 2002 and 2011.

WWE is always very protective of the way they portray their own history, and to be honest, remembering the last brand split probably isn't going to built anticipation for the next one. Still, it's a pretty huge omission for those of us who were there. While they did mention it later during a match with The Dudley Boyz, it was more of an afterthought than anything else.