WWE Raw: Looking into the Strange Booking Decisions from This Week's Show

Perhaps I’m being old-fashioned—I’d rather call it old school—but for me, any go-home broadcast of Monday Night Raw needs to deliver the goods.

And particularly in this day and age, where the build from pay-per-view to pay-per-view rarely lasts more than four to five weeks, this notion has never been truer. Just four weeks removed from SummerSlam, and with Night of Champions six days away, one final push was exactly what we needed ahead of the upcoming pay-per-view.

But I’m not really sure that that’s what we got.

As reluctant as I am to criticise the product, I can’t help but feel that this past week on Monday Night Raw we saw some questionable booking choices at such a pivotal time.

Let’s begin with the matchups themselves.

Our first slice of one-on-one action saw Chris Jericho face Corporate Kane. And no, this isn’t 2002. As talented as these two legends are, with both men the wrong side of 40 this was never going to be the lively affair that an opening bout should be.

Perhaps we should have seen Jack Swagger vs. Bo Dallas take place here instead.

But the sluggish meeting of Jericho and Kane was nothing when compared with Big Show vs. Bray Wyatt. I’ve never been a fan of big guy vs. big guy, and again—both of these guys are fantastic performers, but that doesn’t mean they should have been paired together.

A lethargic match saw Show come up trumps, which also incidentally limits Creative if they were hoping to turn this into a more prolonged rivalry.

One saving grace here was that the show was balanced out with a couple of energetic tag matches involving a slew of Night of Champions opponents. The Usos and Sheamus first faced the ‘Dusts and Cesaro, before Dolph Ziggler and R-Ziggler took on the Miz and Damien Mizdow.

Photo courtesy of WWE.com

Which brings me nicely onto my next point.

As decent as these matches were, it was Cesaro and the Miz who took the pinfalls in their respective contests. As in, the two guys challenging for gold at Night of Champions this Sunday.

Surely, some kind of dirty finish, or even a pinfall taken by R-Ziggler and Mizdow would have been more appropriate here? It’s difficult to take either challenger as seriously now as we head into Night of Champions, which risks tarnishing the whole concept of the PPV's theme.

Another match slated for Night of Champions that we saw hyped on Raw was Roman Reigns vs. Seth Rollins. Although, this was done through the wholly unconventional method of having their PPV showdown actually take place on Raw.

While this opens up the possibility for a swerve finish this Sunday, possibly involving a Dean Ambrose return, for many fans there is now less of an incentive to tune in to this Night of Champions match. Luckily though, this is Reigns and Rollins that we’re talking about, and personally I could watch these guys go at it all day. While I may have qualms from a creative perspective, as a fan of pure pro wrestling ability I’m not going to complain too loudly here.

Photo courtesy of WWE.com

And while we’re on the subject of entertaining action, I want to mention Cena and Brock Lesnar’s tussle.

This was always going to happen, but the particular way in which it went down was the perfect way to tell this story. Lesnar came down and suplexed Cena with consummate ease, showing he’s still the Beast that should be feared.

But Cena got right back up and mounted an offence of his own. Sure Lesnar got up from it, but it only reinforced Cena’s never-say-die attitude.

This perfectly sets up the battle between the strength of Lesnar and the heart of Cena—another nice piece of storytelling from this awesome feud.

Of course, the noticeable point about this segment was that it took place in the middle of the show.

As an Englishman, I’m no expert on the American football season, but I’m reliably informed that the motivation here was to place Cena vs. Lesnar in the half-time break of the Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Indianapolis Colts.

From a ratings standpoint, that seems like a smart move from the WWE for me—providing they can somehow publicise this fact. But the knock-on effect of this was that we saw Mark Henry and Rusev close the show with the former’s USA Rally segment.

Again, you can see the motivation here, and it’s good to see a midcard feud getting some high-profile exposure ahead of the PPV. But was the segment or even this rivalry really strong enough to close the show?

Photo courtesy of WWE.com

And given that Brock Lesnar was in the building, I can’t help but feel that a man of his super-stardom should have been closing the show.

I know we’ve already seen him, but it’s such a rare occurrence for Lesnar to be on Raw that when he is there, they should milk him for all he’s worth.

Obviously I’ve had the benefit of hindsight here, and I’m not saying that some of the ideas that I suggested would have necessarily worked better. But there were certainly some odd calls made on Monday Night Raw this week.

Are people still going to take Cesaro and Miz’s title challenges seriously?

And is there still an interest in seeing Reigns vs. Rollins for the second time in a week?

Simply put, are you guys more hyped for Night of Champions after this week’s episode of Raw?

Or perhaps I'm just being picky with all this...

Please feel free to chime in with your opinions on this one, and let me know in the comments below what you think about Raw this week, as well as any of the points that were covered in the article.