WWE Can’t Use Baron Corbin As An Excuse For Raw’s Struggles

On Monday Night Raw, WWE leaned into the so-called ‘Reality Era’ more than ever by having Seth Rollins deride Baron Corbin for the red brand’s recent real life struggles. Unfortunately, using Baron Corbin as an excuse for Raw’s issues is an angle that just doesn’t work out.

On the December 10th episode of WWE Raw, Seth Rollins opened the show with a blistering call-out of Baron Corbin. When Corbin sauntered down to the ring, Rollins disparaged everything about his “leadership” of Raw, from focusing too much on bathroom jokes to causing the ratings for the show to drop precipitously.

While this may segment may have been able to come off as building Rollins into the top babyface Raw has desperately lacked, instead it left a confusing mess of blurred lines and convenient storyline excuses.

Let’s start our look at what went wrong in this angle by analyzing the obvious eyebrow-raising portion of Rollins’ promo. Seth Rollins explicitly blamed Baron Corbin for Raw’s poor ratings, citing various segments that have been abject failures on the show in recent weeks.

This is problematic for so many reasons it’s hard to pick one to start with. I suppose the most obvious place to start is with the fact that WWE is trying to hide providing us with poor television behind the excuse of developing a storyline.

If Raw has been bad lately, and trust me its had some pretty terrible episodes in the last few weeks, then WWE needs to own it. Creating an impromptu storyline to use as an excuse for poor booking and writing is not owning it in the slightest sense. If WWE really wanted to address Raw’s sliding ratings, maybe they should have cut the excuses from Rollins’ promo and gone straight to the part where he makes a Tables, Ladders, and Chairs match to give the fans something exciting instead.

Even if we look past using Corbin as a scapegoat however, there’s still some major problems with the logic and presentation of this angle.

For one, speaking of that TLC match, Seth Rollins was able to get that match booked after insulting Corbin in the most creative way possible. By creative, I mean I’m referring to Rollins blatantly ignoring the point he just made in his promo in order to get the match made.

Rollins complained in his promo that Baron Corbin has let sophomoric antics run wild on Raw by presenting entire urine-based angles, for example. At least, I assume Rollins was suggesting Corbin let those antics happen instead of actually “booking” them to happen, but we will get to that in a moment.

I’m all for criticizing Raw for relying on playground humor for an angle. I’ve voiced my displeasure for those angles myself multiple times. It’s what Rollins did after that which befuddles me.

Rollins got his desired match booked by literally interrupting the acting Raw GM like a little kid, before poking him repeatedly until Corbin made the match. If we’re suppose to believe Rollins is angry about the lack of substantive storytelling on Raw, needless to say, this wasn’t the way to go about presenting that. A match being booked based on one of the competitors poking the general manager until he makes it is potentially the textbook definition of child-like humor in a story.

Now, let’s go back to the issue with Rollins’ accusations against Corbin. Whether or not it was meant to be presented this way or not, Rollins inadvertently almost made it seem as though Corbin was actually booking the show by suggesting he was responsible for all the potty jokes and general mischief on the show.

WWE general managers throughout history have allowed these kind of antics to go on. Criticizing Corbin because he allows heels to get away with some shenanigans is essentially criticizing every GM that’s ever been on WWE programming. In short, its just not a compelling argument.

Conversely, if the objective is to suggest Corbin actually caused or wrote these things to happen, then WWE is again scapegoating Corbin while potentially breaking the “fourth wall” in another obviously problematic way by placing the onus of television writing on WWE’s GM characters.

At the end of the day, if WWE wants to address the sliding ratings of Raw on-air, there has to be a better way of doing it than using the excuse of building a storyline. Sure, you can have Rollins run down all the heinous acts Corbin has committed in recent weeks, but suggesting he is in some way responsible for Raw’s poor programming is a completely unnecessary attempt to use the so-called “Reality Era” to cover for WWE’s own mishaps.