Previously on the Best and Worst of WWE Raw: Kevin Owens cut a great promo on Goldberg, which also kinda felt like in the movies when a bad guy knows he’s about to die and decides to get all eloquent and crazy before he like, falls off a building into an explosion. Also, Lana hacked the New Day’s plans for an ice cream machine because she’s Russian.
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And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for February 27, 2017.
Worst: Watching This Episode Felt Like Watching Paint Dry On A Dead Horse
This episode was a pile of garbage.
That’s it for this week, folks. Join us this Sunday for FASTLANE: END OF THE LANE!
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Night
The Real Birdman
Come on Bill, you gotta spoiler alert first
indieguy
from jinder to jindrak in 12 easy doses
Clay Quartermain
This Cesaro/Joe segement should end with Joe cutting a statue’s head off with his thrown hat
AddMayne, Joke Conspiracy Victim
“Every day it seems like Triple H’s dick gets bigger and bigger while yours…wait who wrote this?”
AJ Dusman
Rollins is just counter balancing all of the non selling done by the other two members of the Shield.
Amaterasu’s Son
I give the WWE Superstars a D+ on their Black History Book reports.
PhilBallins
Well, considering what just happened to that civilian I guess it’s the Man of Steel Superman punch.
Aerial Jesus
I can’t tell if Noam Dar looks like an overgrown boy or an undergrown man
LUNI_TUNZ
Lesson 3: Since the new titantron doesn’t show what’s happening in the arena, you can’t see someone sneaking up behind you.
SHough610
Me: there’s no way the WWE can make me hate Bayley!
Vince McMahon: hold my beer…
…
…
Wait, are you still here?
Why are you still here?
…
You want me to watch this and make wrestling jokes, don’t you.
…
sigh, fine
Best: Kevin Owens Is Trying Hard, Or
Worst: Kevin Owens Aimlessly Cannonballs Toward Inevitability
Last week I wrote about how the Kevin Owens vs. Goldberg feud reminded me of the CM Punk vs. The Rock feud, where Punk was doing some of the best promo work of his career, and the end result was still the same. Punk had to lose the title before WrestleMania so an “important” (in the eyes of the people in charge) person could be the champion and main-event the big show. For all the world, it feels like Owens spent a year carrying WWE’s flagship show on his back and is walking into a 30-second squash so Goldberg and Lesnar can have another reason to main-event.
This week felt a little more like one of those Twitter feuds you find yourself in sometimes where you like, talk shit about the creepy manchild lead singer of Train on Twitter or whatever and he vanity searches himself, finds it, and responds with something like, “I’M IN TRAIN, WHO ARE YOU? YOU’RE POOR AND YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER EVEN SANG HEY SOUL SISTER.” And by all accounts, you’re right. Train blows. Every song they’ve ever recorded sounds like it’s from the perspective of a serial killer. Their albums are like unflushed turds in Barnes & Noble toilets. All he’s gonna say in response is, “shut up,” but because you only have a few Twitter followers and At Train’s got like 450,000, he “wins” and “owned you” and you spend the next six months getting residual hate tweets from the country’s worst moms. What, only me?
But yeah, that’s what Owens/Goldberg feels like. Owens can destroy him on social media all he wants. He can destroy him to his face on the microphone on Raw. All Goldberg’s got to offer is, “I’M MORE POPULAR!” while screaming about spears and jackhammers and both looking and sounding like George Liquor. Because he’s the popular guy from a long time ago, he “wins.” The crowd cheers him. See also, I guess, CM Punk vs. The Rock again. Even if Owens finds some way to win at Fastlane, it’ll be because Brock Lesnar interfered, or Chris Jericho interfered, or some combination of the two. If he wins, he still loses, and Goldberg and Brock are still going on last. So basically the opening to Raw is, in toto, this picture:
Who knows, maybe Owens will space out and beat the shit out of him, and WWE will make a star for all the pay-per-views between WrestleMania and WrestleMania. It’s fun to play pretend!
A Series Of Unfortunate Events
Or, “the entire middle two hours of this Raw.”
Worst: The Crowd
Before we get too deep into this, we’ve gotta give a firm and hearty Worst to the Green Bay crowd. It’s not like they were given anything exciting or creative to work with, but they were notably not into anything, and made the stuff that we’d normally mentally fast forward through with a shrug feel like fucking purgatory. I think the best way to put it is, “Frank the Clown and Brock Lesnar Guy were sitting next to each other in the front row.” Watch the opening to Cesaro/Samoa Joe. One beloved indie darling super worker hoists a 300 pound other beloved indie darling super worker with a Karelin Lift and those chodes are motionless. At some point you go to so many WWE shows that you stop qualifying as fans and become scenery.
Worst: How Are Y’All Enjoying These Ice Cream Jokes
I hope the rumors of a WrestleMania deletion are true, because nobody on Raw deserves to have fireworks shot at them and/or be drowned in a lake that changes their gimmick more than the goddamn New Day. Here we see them playing R-Truth in the WWE memorial “something happened in pop culture so we’ve got to do a version of it” performance, riffing on the Oscars botch with a Shining Stars match. They should’ve all been wearing Sherlock Holmes hats. Oh, also, they have a catchphrase for their ice cream now. “A mouthful of magic … I’ve gotta have it!” You know what I’ve gotta have? Y’all not being Raw’s cigar store Indians and getting some better material.
But yeah, they cut a promo on the Shining Stars only for it to be revealed in DEADEST POSSIBLE SILENCE that the Stars are supposed to wrestle Big Show, and New Day’s wrestling Handsome Rusev and Steroid-Addled Betrayer Jinder Mahal.
The match ends when Jinder gets rolled up because Rusev’s outside the ring distracted, arguing about last week’s hacking of ice cream machine blueprints. So, basically the same thing that happened last week. New Day doesn’t have a match at Fastlane and they don’t have a match at WrestleMania, so here’s to six more weeks of this.
Worst: Who Does This Segment Cater To?
Titus O’Neil wants to be Sheamus’ tag team partner because they’re both Irish, get it? You probably got it back in 2014 when they started doing that joke.
This leads to a match, with Titus harassing Sheamus before the bell only to get immediately Brogue Kicked and pinned when it rings. Which you may ALSO have seen in 2014, when they did this exact match on Smackdown. Or a month later when they did the same match on Raw.
Worst: Sucks To Be The Tag Team Champions
After two straight weeks of not being able to win 2-on-1 handicap matches against Roman Reigns, the Raw Tag Team Champions get (1) beaten up trying to attack Enzo Amore, the physically weakest actual wrestler on the WWE roster, and (2) pinned more or less twice by Big Cass. First he has Gallows beaten with an Empire Elbow, stops to get distracted, watches Enzo easily dispatch Karl Anderson and then turns around to boot and finish Gallows again. The only way things could be worse for the tag champs is if they were the PREVIOUS tag champs, the longest reigning tag champs in WWE history, who have nothing to do at two straight pay-per-views and have been demoted to “Hosts” concerned with international ice cream cyber-terrorism.
A supplemental Worst goes to that pre-match backstage snippet with Enzo doing a stream of consciousness bit about how cool it would be to have a championship belt because it’s a nametag that’d help him get recognition while he shits and slides into girls’ DMs. Good lord. The crowd is NO BUYS for this promo. Even Cass looks like he’s getting tired of him. Would not totally hate it if Cass booted his head off at Fastlane and joined The Club. Or just booted his head off and like, went solo as Queens’ toughest and tallest anthropomorphic sloth.
Worst: Sasha Banks’ Weird Accent Is Back!
Honestly, I’m just going to pretend this episode never happened, and that they forgot they had a Raw between last week and Fastlane and improv’d this entire thing.
So Charlotte and her oddly mute associate Dana Brooke cut a promo about how Brett Favre, Buster Douglas and “your quarterback” are all one hit wonders like Bayley. Charlotte namedrops the Baha Men, and Dana does NOT interject by singing the chorus to ‘Who Let The Dogs Out’ with the dog noises and redeem the entire segment. So new and improved Smug Amoral Bayley shows up to thank the WWE Universe for taking away her agency and turning her into Sassy Disposable WWE Babyface. Talking has never been Bayley’s strong point, and y’all keep putting her out here reciting poetry and recapping months’ worth of events.
That brings out Sasha Banks, who is back to that weird affected voice she had in September.
Real quick though, what the hell’s going on with Sasha Banks’ accent? “No need for the introduction, Mick. Allow me-UH.” “The one and only legit boss of the WW-auhhh.” Did someone tell her to study tapes to improve her promos and she accidentally study Michelle Branch videos? Turn it inside out so I can see-AH! The part of you that’s drifting over me-AH!
Here she’s pronouncing “Bayley” like “Bayahlayuh,” and says Bayley’s more deserving of the championship than Charlotte “will ever be-uh!” I think the problem is that she can’t walk and talk at the same time. And when she cuts promos she won’t stop walking around or like, bending over at the waist and doing big hand gestures.
This sets up a tag match featuring all four women in the women’s division, because what else are we gonna do?
“Nia Jax has pinned the champion!”
YA DON’T SAY.
If you’re worried that this segment and the match didn’t have enough Stephanie McMahon controlling every aspect of it, here’s the backstage followup, featuring Bayley and Sasha Banks having a deeply natural conversation recapping everything they’ve done so far in the episode and where they’re at personally and professionally until Steph pops in all Sean O’Haire Devil’s Advocate like, “you sure you don’t HATE each other?” So now if Sasha ends up turning on Bayley, it’s because Stephanie McMahon got in her ear and convinced her to, because Stephanie McMahon couldn’t get in Bayley’s ear and convince her to give up the championship. Because Stephanie!
Don’t get that confused with the other Stephanie segment of the night, where she berates Mick Foley for being a feeble, foggy old man who can barely stand up, which will either lead to Mick getting fired because of Stephanie McMahon, or Mick getting motivated and continuing to stand up for himself because of Stephanie McMahon.
Worst: TAKE IT HOME, SETH
And now we reach critical mass for this episode, or as I like to call it, CRITICAL ASS. Corey Graves spends what feels like about 45 minutes interviewing Seth L’n Rollins about his knee injury and whether or not it’ll keep him out of WrestleMania. It will. Spoiler alert. You may have also been spoiled by Rollins showing up on a crutch and slowly hobbling up the stairs and into the ring like he’s out of Hacksaw Ridge. The actual conversation plays something like this:
Graves: So how’s the leg?
Rollins: man, you know dude, it’s my leg, dude
Graves: So WrestleMania or nah
Rollins: dude, I dunno, it’s like, man, come on man, it’s sad
Graves: [nods]
Crowd: [turns into skeletons]
Rollins: dude
Graves: man
Eventually Triple H shows up and summons a wild Samoa Joe to stand guard while he adds 10-ish minutes to the promo to say Rollins is now the Undisputed Past and promise him that if he shows up to WrestleMania, it’ll be the last thing he ever does. Rollins rolls a -5 to promo skills past the 10-minute mark, so he’s like, “if it’s the last thing I ever do, it’ll be the last thing YOU ever do TOO.” At no point does Rollins, the guy who has been hunting Triple H for like half a year and got put on the shelf by H’s command AND ALSO HAS A CRUTCH IN HIS HAND, swing a punch or a crutch. Joe kinda gets on the apron at the end, but doesn’t do anything. AND IT TAKES FOREVER.
This feels like one of those segments that was hot fire on paper, but just didn’t translate. No part of it translated. The Green Bay crowd is too busy Brock Lesnar Guying and Frank the Clowning to care about anything, so the boo-hoo Rollins parts don’t hit. Nobody really likes Seth that much anyway. They nuked those Shield guys into microwave dinners, and you only eat that shit when there’s no other option. Rollins gets shook and it takes too long to get to the point, so when Triple H shows up it’s more like the relief that something might happen, and the crowd getting to see a wrestler they want to see. H doesn’t really say or do anything new and there’s no heat on Rollins, and everybody just heard Rollins say he can’t medically compete at WrestleMania, so they’re building to a “confrontation.” Maybe. And Joe’s there, and the idea I guess is that Rollins and H would get real heated and in each other’s faces, but Rollins wouldn’t take that punch because Joe was breathing down his neck. But Rollins and H were close enough to kiss and Joe was like, on the apron way on the other side. And nothing happened. So there’s no tension, no result, and the promise of Maybe Something.
Brutal.
Beth Phoenix?
I think I speak for everyone on Earth when I say, “you sure you didn’t mean Chyna?”
Worst: Impersonal Book Reports
It sincerely touched my heart when R-Truth said, “King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University and received his Ph.D. on June 5, 1955, with a dissertation on A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman.[29]”
You know what might’ve been good? Letting black athletes actually talk about why these people were important in their own words. Like human beings. Naomi shouldn’t be stuck reading a Wikipedia page for a civil rights leader like she’s JBL listing off championship accomplishments for the fucking Dudley Boys.
What We Did Inside The Purple Ropes This Week
Akira Tozawa attempted to draw blood from a stone and get a reaction out of Green Bay. He was up against Noam Dar, who has been completely devolved into “guy with a girlfriend,” which is at least better than Cedric Alexander, who got downgraded to, “doesn’t have a girlfriend anymore so we forget to put him on the show.”
Just to say it, this match ran 2:58. That’s less than three minutes long. I bring that up because there are FOUR MATCHES on the show shorter than that. Sheamus pinned Titus O’Neil with one move, Big Show beat the Shining Stars in just under two minutes, Cass versus Gallows (with two finishes and a distraction) went 2:45. And then there was the other cruiserweight match of the night:
“Gentleman” Jack Gallagher teams up with “Fake Gamer Girl” TJ Perkins to take on Fake Neville and Actual Neville, and wins with an abdominal stretch on Nese in right around two minutes. Perkins and Gallagher are doing a miscommunication bit a few seconds after the match starts, but they’re working together nicely a few seconds later. Neville doesn’t take Gallagher seriously until he sees him tap out Tony Nese, who at this point kinda makes Enzo Amore feel like Braun Strowman. If you booked Nese vs. Enzo on Raw a teddy bear picnic might break out.
Quick note: does everyone in the division have to do that quick spin kick to the gut? Perkins does it, Neville does it, Tozawa did it earlier.
Anyway, the highlight of the cruiserweights this week was a dick joke:
https://twitter.com/totaldivaseps/status/836419069364547584
Worst: Can We Go Back To Last Week
Last week, Big Show had one of the best matches he’s had in YEARS, a shockingly great main-event hoss battle with shockingly great Braun Strowman. This week, he no-sells the Shining Stars’ pamphleteer gimmicks and squashes them in a minute-58. Here’s three and a half minutes of a pig that loves to surf if you’d like some content.
Best: Hey, A Best!
Like Batista and Eve Torres before it, this Raw decided to get really good right before it stopped.
The main event of WWE GLORY BY HONOR is Samoa Joe vs. Cesaro, referencing an earlier-in-the-show backstage confrontation that really should’ve leaned harder on the “Cesaro is Sami Zayn’s NXT respect senpai” thing.
It’s not the pay-per-view barnburner you want between these two, but it tells a good story. Cesaro tweaks his knee early in the match and Joe pounces on it, because Samoa Joe hates these knees and wants to destroy them. Cesaro’s never able to recover, and Joe’s such a consistent and thorough murderer he just takes advantage of every literal misstep and puts him down. It’s good stuff, which probably would’ve been a lot better if they’d done it in front of an audience that chanted “CM Punk” in the middle of a Seth Rollins injury promo in 2017.
After the match, Joe puts Sami Zayn’s name in his mouth and Zayn jumps him from the side of the stage, proving that what’s good for the goose is good for the other, smaller, ska-loving goose. There’s even a good visual of Sami doing his dive off the stage onto Joe, which would’ve been great if the stage wasn’t currently about a foot high.
Best: I LIVE TO SEE YOU EAT THAT CONTRACT
Finally we get the contract signing for Fastlane between Braun Strowman and Roman Reigns, because the guy who last week said he just wanted to kick ass now needs that shit on paper, because of the world’s least believable reason: he thinks Roman Reigns is going to chicken out and no-show the match. Brother I know you’re supposed to be tough, but that’s the dumbest thing anybody’s ever said on this show. The one thing we fundamentally know about Roman Reigns is that he’ll ALWAYS BE READY FOR A FIGHT or whatever. It’s what we think of before we think “Samoan” and “wet.”
So they do the contract signing, and Braun tells Foley to go screw. Foley once again stands up for himself, because of that magical Good And Evil Witch Of The Every Direction who pulls the strings on everyone on the show. Braun laughs in his face at first but gets increasingly agitated, backing Foley up. That brings out Romey, who spams SUPERMAN PUNCH until they’re in the crowd brawling and spearing security guard Mean Kevin Greene through the backside of the security railing. The crowd goes … mild? Roman could’ve pulled out a gun and shot Strowman between the eyes and Frank the Clown would’ve leaned over to Brock Lesnar Guy and whispered, “you comped for Evolve on Mania weekend?”
But yeah, the brawl is dope. Roman puts Strowman down on the outside, but Strowman gets up and is like NAH THIS AIN’T FINISHED before he can sign his name. Strowman then throws dude into the turnbuckle so hard the turnbuckle comes off, Umaga style. If Roman hadn’t been wearing that bulletproof vest, he’d be dead! Strowman leaves all triumphant, but Roman recovers enough to sign his name on the contract anyway. Nonverbal Roman Reigns is the toughest and best Roman Reigns, and he’d be one of the best brawlers in the sport if he’d incorporate something other than Superman Punches and Kane throat jabs into his moveset.
Same.
All in all, one of the worst Raws in a while, saved in part — a very small part — by the final quarter hour. Let’s get Fastlane out of the way so we can get to the Wrestling Mania, shall we?
That’s (actually) it for this week. Thanks for sticking it out with me. Your homework is to click the share buttons on this post to spread it around, drop down into our comments section to let us know what you thought of the show — pretty sure one of you crazy weirdos loved it and though it was “the best Raw in months” — and pop over to the movie Indiegogo, pop for the Pentagon shirt in the teaser trailer and maybe drop in a few dollars to help us out.
See you on Sunday for the fastest lane!
