Baffling Booking II: Go-Home Show of WWE Raw Before Night of Champions

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The audience’s favorite article that analyzes “baffling booking” has returned! Check out the first edition that featured the Wyatt Family. Unfortunately, it’s never a good thing when it returns.

There could have been editions of this piece after every Raw since SummerSlam because it’s so easy to criticize the product lately. Tonight only made everyone criticize WWE even more.

There was so much to analyze and critique from tonight’s episode. Let’s take a look at what was baffling from last night.

• The first thing to note is the Cameron-Naomi match. Cameron trying to pin her former partner when she wasn’t on her shoulders was an embarrassment to professional wrestling as a whole. I don’t think this was an accident, however. A segment on Total Divas featured Cameron’s struggles in WWE being exposed on the show. They love to tie in things that happened three-four months ago on the Raw the day after the show airs for some reason. I think this was one of them. If it wasn’t, fire her.
• Big Show and the Wyatt Family continue to make me scratch my head. What was the point of having Luke Harper and Erick Rowan choke-slammed? If Show doesn’t end up facing Brock Lesnar next month for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, what’s the point of this push for him? Harper, Rowan, and especially Bray Wyatt would all be wasted for no reason.
• The heels needed to go over in the the Usos and Sheamus vs. the Dust Bros. and Cesaro match. The Swiss Superstar has been taking way too many pin-falls lately and it’s continuing to devalue the United States Championship, which all signs point to Sheamus retaining. Having Goldust or Stardust take the fall wouldn’t have been smart, either. Letting Sheamus or one of the Usos take the fall would have created some doubt in fans’ heads for Night of Champions for their respective title matches. So what does WWE do? They let Cesaro take the fall and cause the heels to lose. There’s still SmackDown for him to maybe make up for this loss, but the blue brand hasn’t been relevant in a long time so whatever he does on there will be irrelevant for Sunday.

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• WWE continues to place the Divas Championship in the background of the Bella war. The focus in the match was on Nikki and Brie. Paige and AJ Lee felt like sideshow attractions once again. Them skipping around after the match is supposed to make us more excited for Sunday? Come on WWE. At least they didn’t hand the Bellas a mic last night. That was a plus.
• Roman Reigns vs. Seth Rollins is scheduled for Night of Champions on Sunday. It was also scheduled for last night’s Raw. First though that popped into my head was “This will probably end with a dirty finish.” Somewhere out there, Kane was going to come out of nowhere and save Rollins from defeat, right? Instead, Reigns gets the clean victory. So why is this being booked again for Sunday? Why should any of us want to see a rematch between these two when we already saw a clean finish? Reigns isn’t losing clean on Sunday. There’s no way WWE would let that happen at this moment in time. Is he really going to go over Rollins again clean? Dean Ambrose or Kane must interfere and cause a DQ, otherwise, WWE is risking The Architect’s credibility, even with the Money in the Bank briefcase.

• John Cena, Brock Lesnar, and Paul Heyman had a very entertaining exchange at “halftime” and they had probably the best segment of the night. I enjoyed it a lot. Why wasn’t it at the end of the show, though? I understand wanting to pull viewers away from Monday Night Football, but this being put in the middle of the show didn’t make people think “Okay, I’m sold on Night of Champions.” Did it make plenty of people sold on their match alone? Yes. What replaced it in the final segment of the show blew my mind and many others.

• Rusev and Mark Henry would close out the show as the latter attempted to “rally America”. If they threw this in before Reigns-Rollins, this would have woke up the crowd for the final match. Putting this at the very end of the show to make this feud more meaningful was a horrible idea. You could see on TV that fans in the Cajundome were leaving during the segment because this just wasn’t important to see. It was such a flat way to end this mediocre show of Raw. Henry did okay with his speech, Rusev did his usual thing, but Lana’s promo was very long. She actually was getting boring listening to and the crowd didn’t seem into her. Did any of this make their battle at Night of Champions feel more important? Not one bit.

Being so negative about the WWE product is not fun, it’s just well-deserved.

SummerSlam was a terrific show that had a great build-up, which was followed up by entertaining matches. Night of Champions has had a poor build-up, but it makes the need for it to deliver greater than ever, especially after NXT Takeover 2.

WWE needs to get everything sorted out for Sunday, otherwise the anger level among the fans will rise.