Braun Strowman Threw An Office Chair At Roman Reigns' Face Last Night

Welcome to the weekly RAW recap! Last night was an interesting show for me because Trent hung around the office to watch the season finale of The Bachelorette, and because it was such an important show to him, we decided he got the audio. So imagine that, you’re watching RAW on mute and you can see the crowd pop and turn to the entrance ramp every 10 minutes, but have NO IDEA who’s coming out! It was like a boring Royal Rumble all night!

I’ve since went back and watched all the promos back with audio so I could talk about them, so let’s talk about them!

The Miz kicked off RAW with a quick segment of MizTV before Universal Champion Brock Lesnar interrupted, and there’s just something about RAW that drags the segment down for me. I thought MizTV was always well done on SmackDown last year, but it just feels more contrived and ‘scripted’ on RAW. It could be because everyone seems to have a talk show segment now, it could be because RAW is three hours and I know it’ll drag on, it could be because Miz is given less creative control, I don’t know. Brock came down and threw fools all over the place though, and that was great.

While I still hate Seth’s “BURN IT DOWN” theme and the new Windows Movie Maker graphics to go with it, I really enjoyed this match with Sheamus. I think his selling has gotten a lot better since moving away from his knee, and he works well with Sheamus and Cesaro.

Annnnnnnnnnnd the Jason Jorgle experiment has failed! The crowd was cheering the fat, Bull Dempsey looking jobber against him, and the segment can only be read as Jason’s dad giving him easy opponents to butter him up for a title shot. Chad Gable is already more over than him from one match with Rusev.

Alright, so Bayley is injured and has to miss her match with Alexa at SummerSlam. She cut a pretty mediocre promo and the crowd booed her, which sucked and wasn’t fair to her, but wrestling crowds suck. This match was made with the stipulation that the winner would face Nia Jax next week (Nia had a ‘qualifying match’ too, but come on), and the winner of that would now challenge Alexa for the Women’s Championship. It was painfully obvious from the start that Sasha Banks would be the winner of this match, and the ride to get there was NOT FUN. This was one of the worst, sloppiest matches I’ve seen in many weeks. Sasha won, and she’ll now have the opportunity to kill herself trying to make Nia look good next week.

Another week, another great promo from Enzo Amore that he follows up by proving he can’t back it up. Cass comes out, beats the shit out of Enzo, and gets his from the Big Show. I’m not sure if it’s a deliberate attack on Enzo’s overness because of the rumored backstage heat he has or if they’re genuinely trying to make something out of this feud and failing worse than I’ve ever seen. Enzo, Cass, and Show are all playing their roles well, by the way, it’s just their material is impossible to work with. Shoutout to this sell:

Bray Wyatt interrupted Finn Bálor, got his ass whooped, disappeared, and reappeared on the titantron instructing Finn to run. From what, you ask? I don’t know. Obviously not Wyatt though, because HE was the one running from Bálor. Not a bad segment by any means, however. This feud has exceeded my low expectations.

Dean Ambrose defeated Cesaro by disqualification after Sheamus got involved, and Seth Rollins ran down for the save. After the match, the two former Shield brothers stood in the center of the ring and received a thunderous ovation from the crowd. Ambrose put the past behind him and put his fist in front of him, but Seth couldn’t do the same. For the shit I give Seth and the WWE’s handling of The Shield post-breakup, this moment felt huge. I’m very interested in where they’re going to take this and it’ll be a big topic of discussion on From The Top Rope with me and Carrabis tomorrow. Subscribe!

Our main event of the evening was a last man standing match between two familiar opponents: Braun Strowman and Roman Reigns. If their matches declined in quality or overness at all I’d start to worry about WWE running this stale (much like the Enzo/Cass feud), but neither of those two things are happening. I don’t know if they even can happen when Braun is throwing objects like baseballs…

…and Roman Reigns is using his freak Samoan strength to pick that man up and drop him through tables…

…and Samoa Joe is choking homeboys unconscious.

The road to Summerslam is heating up, and I’m starting to get giddy. Tune into the blog tomorrow for a SmackDown recap and tune into the podcast tomorrow for a Pete Gas interview!