5 things that could happen on RAW next week
Another episode of Monday Night RAW is in the books. We’re only one week away from the 25th Anniversary special and less than 2 weeks away from the Royal Rumble PPV event.
Not a ton happened on this week’s episode as it pertains to strong build to the Rumble event, but there were a few decent stories told and some teases for what may come in the future.
Most of it built to stuff that will probably happen after the Royal Rumble event, which would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s an extremely important show and WWE is almost treating it like it doesn’t exist.
WWE will touch on more of this week’s episode as well as what I think is imminent for the 25th Anniversary of RAW next week, but first, let’s look at last week’s predictions.
- Jordan and Rollins lose to The Miztourage
Instead of Jordan bungling things up for his team, he made a couple of shrewd moves this week. He interrupted the match that The Bar was having and caused them to lose, got his dad to book Seth Rollins in a match with Finn Balor, who they lost to last week, and then cheated to help Rollins defeat Balor in said match. And Rollins… liked it? Seth was shocked and surprised by what he did, curbstomping Balor almost out of instinct, but he appeared to appreciate the help from Jordan. Interesting development.
The Miztourage ended up losing to Roman Reigns in a handicap match that was largely a waste of time. The Miz cut another great promo, and then just stood ringside and failed to successfully interfere, and then his team lost. It was an extremely poor way to build up to next week’s big title match and did nothing to make it more interesting. They should have just left it at Miz’ promo and been done with it.
- Bray Wyatt loses to Curt Hawkins thanks to Matt Hardy
Oddly enough, Bray Wyatt didn’t even appear on this week’s episode of RAW. Matt Hardy had another match and successfully defeated Heath Slater without much difficulty. I wonder if they are actually going to go anywhere with the Slater/Rhyno stuff or if it’s just an excuse for the commentary team to talk about something other than the match when those two guys are out there.
Hawkins did end up getting eaten by Braun Strowman, which is about as much different as you can get from getting a win over Bray Wyatt. I wonder why Bray wasn’t on the show this week.
- Continued boring lack of story progression for the Women’s Rumble
As expected, nothing is going on. Asuka and Nia Jax had a good match that had an ending that made Nia look weak, which I don’t think was the intended outcome. She’s supposed to be a physically dominant monster, but when her knee hurts, she clutches at it and nearly cries? Really? A count-out would have been far better, or at least something that didn’t involve her doing a terrible acting job by “crumbling” because she couldn’t put weight on her leg and almost coming to tears.
If you want me to think Asuka and Nia are THE forces to be reckoned with, then have them destroy each other and end the match without a winner. Don’t have one of the participants lose because her knee hurts. That makes her look incredibly weak and is the antithesis of building someone up as dominant. It didn’t even make Asuka look good, because she got lucky that Nia’s leg fell between the ring and the steps, and she just let the ref give her the win instead of trying to further injure Nia’s leg.
On the other side, we had yet another match that featured the three main babyface women and the Absolution team. This time it was a one-on-one with Sasha Banks losing to Sonya Deville clean in under 3 minutes. It was a fine match and the kick that ended the match looked good, and I like that Sonya got a definitive, clean victory over the former multi-time Women’s Champion. But I’m unbelievably tired of this formula. It’s the same thing every week. The good guys have each others’ backs so the bad guys don’t get an advantage.
Shouldn’t you want one of your opponents to be weakened before the Rumble match? Why defend her when you can easily just stand by and let her get hurt? Protecting Sasha just makes it more difficult for Bayley and Mickie to win the Rumble match. And at least Bayley and Sasha have a history of being friends. Why is Mickie out there? Is she their mom? The cool aunt, maybe? Ugh. The lack of any cohesive story is killing me and continues to sour me on the message that the women are actually part of a revolution/evolution.
- Jordan and Rollins are guests on Miz TV
Nothing involving these guys and Miz/Miztourage this week. Interesting. I wonder if due to Ambrose’ injury, they’re going to try to separate the Shield guys from each other until Dean is ready to come back. In any event, Jordan and Rollins did their own thing, and I liked it, actually, so I’m happy to be wrong on this one.
- Kane gets the upper hand
Interestingly enough, Kane wasn’t anywhere to be seen this week. I get that they want to sell that he and Brock were nearly killed by Braun last week, but these guys are all supposed to be superhuman. None of them should be selling things to each other for more than a very short period of time. Braun was a lot of fun on this week’s show, though, so I’m not by any means bothered by getting this one wrong. Kane shouldn’t be getting the one-up on anybody anyway, and everything he does at this point should go exactly the way it did when he chokeslammed Brock, who completely no-sold it and sat right up. Man, the match at the Royal Rumble has a chance to be extremely bad, and when Brock retains the title it’s going to be even worse because Philly is going to be begging to see Braun take that belt.
Overall, I went 1 for 5 this week. Not disappointing in any other fact that I’m disappointed that I was right that they continue to have no idea whatsoever about how to book the women’s division. It’s truly frustrating to a guy like me who really enjoys women’s wrestling and has been begging for YEARS for them to stop wasting them.
#5 A big brawl between all of the women in the Rumble
I’m going to have some version of “nothing important” somewhere in every RAW and SmackDown column until WWE actually tells some kind of story with the women. Until then, I’m going to behave like them. Vague and uninteresting. On the 25th Anniversary / last RAW before the Royal Rumble, the main thing that will happen with the women will be an all-out brawl occurring at some point in the show. It may take place when a match gets out of hand, or, preferably, in a segment that involves some of the women from the past who are scheduled to appear.
Nikki and Brie Bella are the only women announced for the show who are likely to be in the match in 2 weeks, but it wouldn’t be shocking to see a surprise return from Trish Stratus. That would honestly be more effective, in my opinion, than having her as a surprise Rumble entrant. Yeah, it will get a big pop on the show, but it will get a bigger one if it happens on RAW, and it might help draw in a few extra fans to watch the show if they are guaranteed that one of the most anticipated entrants will indeed be in the match.