For the average wrestling fan, your reception of this week’s WWE Raw likely depended on how excited you were to see Jon Cena. Even if you felt that the promotion satiated your fix there, there weren’t many other strong reasons to tune into the show.
Yes, you get to see your favorite wrestlers, but watching YouTube clips could satisfy those same needs without subjecting yourself to three hours of tedious programming. This doesn’t mean that everything on this episode disappointed, but like with most losing sports teams, the negatives far outweighed the positives.
These are three things that went wrong on the June 27 episode of WWE Raw.
AJ Styles defeats The Miz by countout
Since WWE can’t find anything else to do with him, AJ Styles continued his purgatory program with The Miz on this week’s Raw. First, the two eliminated each other from the Last Chance Battle Royal for the penultimate men’s Money in the Bank ladder match spot.
It seemed like WWE booked that outcome as a means to set up a Miz vs. Styles match for Money in the Bank, but WWE had other, worse plans.
Instead, the two-faced off on Raw in a match that Miz bogged down with one of his worst in-ring performances of the year. Worse yet, the match ended with Miz walking to the back and taking a countout loss, which is right out of the WWE “book a bad finish to put ‘heat’ on the heel and set up a rematch” playbook.
As noted before in similar pieces, the heat for these finishes goes directly to the company for contriving a lazy conclusion, and given the match’s less-than-stellar quality, it’s unlikely that fans would beg to see a rematch. WWE should’ve held off on this until the pay-per-view.
Teasing Logan Paul’s return
Before Miz faced Styles, the former WWE Champion teased something horrifying: Logan Paul’s return to WWE television. Worse yet, it appears that WWE is setting Paul up to return as a babyface.
On the one hand, Paul’s re-emergence shouldn’t surprise anyone. Despite being a shaken-up can of White privilege soda, WWE views Paul as someone who will generate buzz for the company (and likely see his many terrible controversies and him simply “getting a reaction out of people” or something), so they will obtusely bring him back over and over again and book him as a protagonist because he’s a “star”.
That said, he’s awful and the level of celebrity he already has for being awful is too much. But given who owns the company and who WWE has pushed in the past (and is pushing now) that isn’t really a dealbreaker for them, so prepare yourself for more Miz/Paul segments that no one asked for.
Bobby Lashley vs. The Alpha Academy with Theory as the special enforcer
With John Cena on the show, WWE further tributed the 16-time world champion by having one of his contemporaries “overcome the odds” in a preposterous match. Either that or WWE’s booking hasn’t changed in 20 years (it’s the latter).
Indeed, WWE booked Bobby Lashley to face The Alpha Academy (Otis and Chad Gable) in a handicap match. However, WWE apparently felt that putting the babyface at a 2-on-1 disadvantage wouldn’t produce the necessary heat or that The Alpha Academy, former Raw Tag Team Champions, lacked the credibility to make people believe that they could beat Lashley, so the promotion added Theory to this as the special enforcer.
Of course, Lashley would overcome the numbers game and make Gable tap to the Hurt Lock and he chased off Gable, Otis, and Theory after the match, so at least this didn’t end with HEEEEAAAAAT. However, it also shows how few ideas WWE has if it’s re-using mid-2000s tropes.