Uninspired Booking Continues on Raw as Bobby Lashley Faces Drew McIntyre Again

The uninspired booking of WWE Raw continued Monday night when Drew McIntyre defeated Kofi Kingston to earn a third consecutive pay-per-view championship match with Bobby Lashley at Hell in a Cell on June 20.

Rather than going a different route and putting Kingston over to set up a fresh title bout, or building a new challenger for Lashley to defend against rather than the same guy he has already beaten twice, the company lazily went the same direction it has for the last three months, leaning on a feud that became stale right around the time of WrestleMania Backlash.

It is not the first time McIntyre has been plagued by a feud that overstayed its welcome.

Last summer, he battled Randy Orton in three out of four PPV title matches. Rather than do anything to make his character interesting or inject either of the feuds with some sort of intrigue, WWE Creative has opted for lackluster, repetitive booking.

And it does not stop at the main event.

On three episodes of Raw in May, Shelton Benjamin and Cedric Alexander have competed in matches that have done nothing to elevate either man or further their feud. They have traded wins and appear to be on a treadmill with no upward or downward momentum to speak of.

It just...happens.

And that is the biggest indictment of the Raw writing team.

The show that once saw "Stone Cold" Steve Austin pop the Madison Square Garden audience by stunning Mr. McMahon in one of the most enduring moments ever has become the scene of redundancy. It has become a show where guys wrestle every week without anything really happening.

What was once destination programming for millions of fans has become so inconsequential due to heartless, heatless booking that even the Going In Raw Pro Wrestling Podcast , which covers brands from across the industry but is named after the flagship show, announced Monday it will stop covering the broadcast night-of because of the considerable dip in quality.

It leads to the next week's show, and then the next, before the ice-cold feuds come to a head in what is typically a strong PPV offering that creates hope and excitement for a better product.

Then the following night's Raw happens, and everyone realizes we are back to the same bloated, three-hour mess we were subjected to a month ago.

There will be some who argue that the COVID-19 pandemic is directly responsible for the current state of Raw but they would be wrong. The issues facing the red brand now have been a monster-sized piece of the bigger WWE puzzle for years.

The inability to come up with something fresh or new spawns rehashes and rematches, creating a general apathy about the product that no special appearance by Hulk Hogan, The Undertaker or Triple H can ever fix—no matter how many times they have tried.

For a roster as talented as WWE's, that is yet another indictment on the writers.

We have Reginald eating up screen time while Jeff Hardy and Mustafa Ali are relegated to Main Event. There are three hours to work with every week, but the company seems content to use the same faces multiple times over that span instead of mixing in new performers to freshen things up. 

Until the current creative team snaps out of it and realizes it must do something different or risk devaluing Raw to the point of no return, it will remain the biggest disappointment in professional wrestling.

The fans will return to the stands in July and create a momentary spark because of the energy they bring to the shows. If WWE continues to deliver the swill it has for the better part of the last three years, that energy will be short-lived and the flagship will again more closely resemble the Titanic.