BRM Reivews the 7/27/2020 Raw (a TERRIBLE show with an awesome main event)

[Big Red Machine]

RANDY ORTON PROMO- bad
He’s decided he wanted to be WWE World Heavyweight Champion again. Why did he not want to be champion before? Sheer laziness?
He said typical Randy Orton things. Drew not coming out and confronting Randy over this felt very out of character. So did Randy not getting upset when Nia Jax decided not to wait for him to get to the back before coming out for her own promo.

NIA JAX PROMO- bad
She says she got screwed out of a title match by bad referee and was owed a rematch but Charlotte decided to cut in line and got a title match instead of her, so she took Charlotte out. Yeah… and how much good did that do you if we haven’t seen you since Charlotte got injured, either? If you wanted this title match so badly, where has you been for the past month while someone else was cutting you in line?
Shayna Baszler come out to save us all from this crap. Nia starts a brawl, and a gaggle of referees come out to break them up. Upon our return from commercial, we got…

THE STREET PROFITS JABBER FOR NO REASON- We’re now on our THIRD STRAIGHT IN-RING TALKING SEGMENT to start the show. This is even more offensive than the other two because THERE WAS NO PURPROSE TO THISE WHATEVER! They’ve just randomly decided that they want to be ring announcers for this #1 contendership match, so they’re going to waste time telling us this first, and then take forever to do the intros for the…

SUMMERSLAM #1 CONTENDERSHIP MATCH: Viking Raiders vs. Cedric Alexander & Ricochet vs. Angel Garza & Andrade “Cien” Almas (w/Zelina Vega)- 6/10
The babyface Street Profits were total assholes to the heels despite not having been provoked at all. Montez referred to Cedric as “Cedric ‘the Sports Entertainer’ Alexander.” If CedRicochet win, I hope Cedric spends the entire SummerSlam match stiffing the living sh*t out of Montez.
The heels jump the bell on the babyfaces and throw them all out of the ring. Instead of the bell ringing, we get the heels going over to jaw with the Street Profits, who are now on commentary. And the we go to a f*cking commercial break. Just start the match? No. That would be silly. We’ve got to do this pointless f*cking spot so that we can wait until after the commercial for the match to start. Do fans want to see as much of the match as possible? Yes. But when you’ve DONE NOTHING BUT TALK FOR TWENTY F*CKING MINUTES, delaying the start of a match until after a commercial is just going to piss people off even more!

So in this match we have:
1. The Viking Raiders, who 1) have not won a match in over a month, including TWO losses to another team in this match and a loss in a title match to the tag champs, and 2) whose only victory in the past THREE MONTHS has been an eight-man tag comedy match in which three members of the opposing team were nameless.
2. Zelina’s crew, who lost clean to the tag champs just last week, and have also struggled to pick up wins against anyone isn’t the aforementioned loser Viking Raiders (whose presents in this match exposes those wins as being meaningless), including two losses to a non-regular team in Apollo Crews and Kevin Owens, and losing a handicap match.
3. Cedric Alexander & Ricochet whose only victories in the past three and a half months have been either last week’s victory in a six-man tag where the third man won the match for their team, or wins over jobbers, and who even lost to a team of jobbers back in April.
NONE of these f*cking teams deserve to be in this match, which makes me wonder why they even booked it. SummerSlam isn’t for another four weeks. Don’t tell me you can’t pick two of these teams and have them win two matches over other teams and book a #1 contendership match two weeks from now, because you can.

The announcers even called attention to the fact that Cedric and Ricochet’s “win loss record isn’t what they’d like it to be.” This infuriating for several reasons. Firstly, they’re calling attention to a major weakness. Secondly, of the three teams in this match, Cedric and Ricochet and the one that I could at least remember the last time they won.
The reason they’re in here despite their bad record is that “there seems to be a universal agreement amongst the WWE Universe that these two are championship material.” In other words, “wins and losses don’t matter. You can get a #1 contendership match if everyone thinks you’re good enough that you might be able to beat the champions.” That, of course, just begs the questions of why the result of this match should matter any more than any of the others? If they lose this match is everyone suddenly going to stop thinking that they’re “championship material?”


This was a standard WWE action-match for the time it got. The Street Profits were extremely annoying on commentary. Zelina’s Crew won, which is utterly infuriating because WHY THE F*CK DID THEY LOSE TO THE CHAMPS CLEAN LAST WEEK?! THESE MATCHES WERE TAPED ON THE EXACT SAME NIGHT!

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- meh
Garza and Andrade attacked the Street Profits. The Street Profits had been so annoying thus far that I popped for this.

NIA JAX vs. SHAYNA BASZLER- no rating, TERRIBLE segment
They keep building up that Nia Jax has heat with this referee. The match went to a double-count in less than a minute. They kept fighting, but screwed up what seemed like it was suppose dot be their big spot when Nia managed to drop Shayna when trying to lift her up from the legs resulting in Nia Jax taking down Shayna Baszler with (the world’s worst) double-leg take-down).
Security was called in to break this up, but which I mean there were TWO security guard and also some guy in a tie we’d never seen before. They had more referees to break these two up from fighting half an hour ago! The dork got beaten up. Some referees finally came out to hold Shayna back.

SETH ROLLINS & MURPHY BACKSTAGE- snore
This was another segment that seemed to exist just to fill time until we hit a commercial.

SETH ROLLINS CALLS OUT DOMINIC MYSTERIO- bad segment
Seth spent A LOT of time framing this, and on a night where we hadn’t wasted so much damn time talking already, I probably would have appreciated this, but there has already been soooooo much f*cking talking on this show that my patience for it is at an end.
Seth tries to subtly be fatherly. He tells Dominic he can talk to him any time Dominic needs guidance and offered him a hug Dominic double-legged Seth and started to punch him so Murphy ran in to help Seth and together they kicked the sh*t out of Dominic… and f*cking Byron Saxton has the temerity to excoriate Seth for being a hypocrite and saying he “didn’t want any more violence.” DUDE… DOMINIC IS THE ONE WHO ATTACKED SETH! Seth offered him a hug! I’m not saying Dominic shouldn’t have attacked Seth, but calling Seth a hypocrite here when he wasn’t the one who started the fight is ridiculous!
Poor Dominic is getting absolutely mugged, and not one f*cking person is coming out here to help him. It’s not until Seth aims him towards the stairs that the injured Aleister Black comes out to make the save. Byron proudly declared that “Aleister Black’s not going to stand by and let another atrocity be committed by the Monday Night Messiah!” which just makes all of the other babyfaces look bad for being perfectly willing to let a supposed “atrocity” take place. Whatever happened to Humberto Carrillo? Is he injured, or has Creative just forgotten that he was part of this feud?
Aleister is injured so he gets taken out. One referee has come out to help. Seth orders Murphy to rake Aleister’s eye out. Murphy seems to be having second thoughts completely out of nowhere so Seth slaps him a few times before he gives in and starts to do it. Murphy moves Aleister over to the steps and lines his eye up with the corner when out comes… a second referee, to join the first one in yelling at Murphy not to do this.
Seriiusly, WHERE ARE THE BABYFACES?! A dude is about to LOSE HIS EYE!
Yup. There it goes. And out come a trainer and a THIRD referee. Now they’re going over to Dominic, but he’s got a Kendo stick to defend himself, so good for Dominic. Seth runs away ,and the referee stop Dominic from giving chase in a MUCH more forceful manner than they tried to stop Murphy from TAKING OUT ALEISTER BLACK’S EYE!

R-TRUTH & MUSTAFA ALI BACKSTAGE- This was dumb, but at least Ali declared that he wasn’t interested in the Goofball Loser Championship.

THE VIP LOUNGE WITH SPECIAL GUEST MUSTAFA ALI- fine
Please, G-d, don’t tell me they’re going to have Mustafa Ali be an idiot and walk into a probably trap with no back-up. The talked more. It was good. Just when it looked like the Hurt Business was about to attack Ali, R-Truth came out and tackled Shelton Benjamin. Truth chased Shelton to the back, and apparently it was decided that this meant it was now time for…

MUSTAFA ALI vs. BOBBY LASHLEY (w/MVP & Shelton Benjamin)- 6.5/10
R-Truth appears to have disappeared somewhere because Shelton is at ringside and Truth is nowhere to be seen. Tozawa has apparently been hiding under the ring the whole time. He tries to win he 24/7 Title but gets beaten up by Shelton and MVP. Lashley goes out to beat up a ninja, allowing Ali to get the advantage on him with a suicide dive… but that’s a dive by the babyface so in WWE it means we are required to cut to a commercial. And, because this is WWE, when we get back from the commercial, the heel must be in control.
They brought Ali back with a big win last week… so of course he jobs cleanly to Lashley this week. Raw is now half over and this has been the only thing on it even close to worth seeing, and that is purely because of how well Ali sells.

CHARLY CARUSO INTERVIEWS DOLPH ZIGGLER- Dolph says that he’s the one “going to SummerSlam and I’m going to be beat Drew McIntyre for the championship that night.” Um… isn’t your match tonight a title match? I’m 99% certain that that was what was said last week.

SASHA BANKS & BAYLEY PROMO- bad
They claim Steph is jealous of them and that they run everything. AT BEST this will lead to them feuding with f*cking STEPH, or at worst it will be a waste of time. Actually, maybe I’ve got that backwards.

WWE RAW WOMEN’S TITLE MATCH WHERE THE TITLE CAN CHANGE HANDS ON A COUNT-OUT OR DQ, AND ALSO IF SOMEONE INTERFERES, BUT ISN’T THAT COVERED UNDER A DQ? ALSO, THE TITLE MAY OR MAY NOT CURRENTLY BE VACANT: Asuka(c?) vs. Sasha Banks- 7.25/10
This was yet another match where they had both participants in the ring, but instead of just ring the bell, they had to do something to take us into the commercial break without starting the match. In this case, that was have Kairi chase Bayley to the back, which was silly because if I’m one of the competitors, I wouldn’t have wanted by ally out here in the first place, so why did they come out in the first place?
We get back from the commercial and… the match can’t start because we didn’t have the official introductions. JUST GIVE ME THE F*CKING WRESTLING!
Just like at the PPV, Sasha and Asuka are having this great match… and suddenly, up on the TitanTron, we see Bayley beating up Kairi Sane. WHO PUT THAT UP THERE?! Steph specifies that she wants no interference in this match, but someone in the truck thought it was okay to put something up on the TitanTron that could distract the wrestlers?! Are you kidding me?!
Tom Phillips blames this on Bayley, saying that she did “the only thing she could think of distract Asuka,” but we have absolutely no proof that Bayley even knows that this is being broadcast on the Tron.
They’re actually f*cking CUTTING AWAY FROM THE TITLE MATCH to show is the backstage beating now. Asuka eventually gives up and limps to the back, losing this title match and title by count-out, despite having Sasha clearly beaten. So we made Sasha look like sh*t and put the belt on her all at the same time. I cannot even explain how angry I am right now. This is like what watching Impact used to do to me, or Smackdown in 2017 with smug-ass Shane McMahon all over the place, Jinder Mahal as the champion, and terrible, repetitive booking in the women’s and tag divisions.

BAYLEY AND SASHA BRAG ABOUT SASHA’S VICTORY- annoying, and not in a good way.

CHARLY CARUSO ASKS ASUKA FOR WORD ON KAIRI’S CONDITION- bad
Asuka just started screaming, which might have been effective if randomly yelling in Japanese hadn’t been the majority of what she did in the majority of her interviews for the past three four months.

REGIS TRIBUTE- good

BUDDY MURPHY vs. HUMBERTO CARRILLO- 5.75/10
Oh. So Carrillo is here, and Creative does remember him. So why didn’t he come out to help earlier? The match was great for a match that went less than seven minutes. Murphy won.

DREW MCINTYRE PROMO- great!
He accepts Orton’s challenge for SummerSlam.

EXTREME RULES MATCH: Dolph Ziggler vs. Drew McIntyre- 8.25/10
These guys beat the absolute sh*t out of each other. This was the most violent match I can remember in WWE in a very long time. They wrestled like they knew this show blew chunks and it was up to them to save it.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- painfully predictable
Yeah, you guessed it. An RKO out of supposedly nowhere even though we all knew it was coming.


This was a TERRIBLE episode of Raw, full of BAFFLING booking decisions. The main event rocked, but didn’t come close to saving something this bad.

STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Byron Saxton- “Could you imagine if Cedric Alexander and Ricochet had the platform of SummerSlam to showcase their talent in a tag team championship match?”
Yes, Byron I can. And do you know why I can? BECAUSE THE WRESTLERS DON’T KAYFABE TRY HARDER JUST BECAUSE IT’S A F*CKING PAY-PER-VIEW!