WWE Hot Take: Triple H's Booking Misfires on Raw Beginning to Pile Up

It's going to take a near-impossible amount of stumbles for pro wrestling fans to sour on the Triple H-led era of WWE.

But the recent efforts of the Raw brand have things starting to walk that way.

The big culprits are the main event scene featuring Judgment Day, plus Cody Rhodes and Jey Uso while WWE sits in this awkward holding pattern during a dry part of the season before the build to 'Mania can start in earnest.

This wasn't all that hard to see coming, either. Early warning signs popped up back at Money in the Bank when Damian Priest won the briefcase. In an alternate timeline right now, LA Knight took it, storyline-d his way to Raw and beat Seth Rollins and is currently the hottest thing running in pro wrestling while heading for a main event at 'Mania.

Alas, we've got Priest with a briefcase and doing nothing with it.

No, really—fans have had to suspend their disbelief to levels that are a bit too much even for pro wrestling. There were multiple times when Rollins was super vulnerable after a PLE because of Shinsuke Nakamura exploiting his long-term injured back. These were no-brainer cash-in chances, but one night, Priest went to party and the other, well, Priest had a boo-boo on his knee, so those things trumped bringing an entire stable down to the ring to beat an injured guy for a world championship, apparently.

At this point, it's pretty hard to get excited about Priest winning his cash-in attempt and creating an inter-stable dynamic with others that causes tension because....they're doing that without the title. This also does a disservice to whoever ends up beating him. The other option is having him lose the cash-in attempt which is just...get it over with then?

We've also got the tag titles, which have now hot-potatoed in Charlotte Flair-esque fashion quickly. Rhodes and Uso won them for, well, reasons, only to lose them again in a matter of weeks so they could go back to Judgment Day.

And while the justification is storyline progression because Rhea Ripley has been wheeling and dealing and the Bloodline got involved to spoil the title run, it's just boring. Both stables have hit a dangerous oversaturation point.

That's especially true of Bloodline, where moving Jey off to be a solo Superstar by himself was always as weird as it gets. Crowds love the chants, but is anyone buying him as a guy who beats Rollins or Reigns and carries a program on his back? Maybe we should have seen these struggles coming when Jey "quit" WWE and the company even sold it by taking him off public-facing rosters, only for him to show up pretty much right away on Raw. Then his solo run, emphasized by his music, turned into tag titles.

Everything around Rhodes' orbit has been mid for a while, too, unfortunately. Fans gave the sloppy reasoning for a feud with Brock Lesnar a pass, but now he's been in waiting-on-'Mania purgatory and even winning tag titles for some reason.

Thanks to this weird Rhodes-Jey dynamic and the need to keep Drew McIntyre relevant, every Raw feels like one of those old general manager modes from the WWE video games where you never really know what you're going to get out of the weekly simulation, but there's always one or two really big things that are just head-scratchingly weird.

This has hardly touched on Seth Rollins, too. But his lack of selling against Nakamura despite the presentation of the back injury has spoiled the magic of his deserving run. He's the opposite of the rarely-appearing Reigns in the sense he's doing too much now and it's only a matter of time before fans sour on yet another of his runs.

Granted, there are still great things happening on Raw. Gunther is a top guy who won't ever fade from that rep at this point and his recent clash with Bronson Reed was a classic. Nakamura's going to remain just as hot if he keeps pulling off matches like the one he had against Ricochet.

But once again, WWE's trying to walk this fine line between appeasing hardcore fans with stuff like that while otherwise asking everyone to be patient until stuff starts mattering again while emphasizing what pops live crowds and little else.

So in a way, maybe some things just never change and hey, here's more proof that WWE could use an offseason or to at least let wrestlers take time off in batches. Something to liven up these lulls. It will never happen, but here we are with déjà vu again.

If there's a saving grace, it's that Triple H and WWE can right this ship in a hurry. The talent is there, the storytelling and execution is not. But the fresh-feeling honeymoon phase for this new era is over. Right now, the weekly Raw efforts aren't helping that much, with Triple H being the latest unable to figure out how to make the down period of the calendar compelling enough for fans to care.