WWE Raw 3/11/2024: 3 Things We Loved And 3 Things We Hated
Another edition of WWE's flagship program has come and gone, as WWE presented another episode of "Raw" from Houston, TX's Honda Center. The show was headlined by fan favorite Sami Zayn overcoming not only tremendous odds but also his current fasting for Ramadan to win a chance to dethrone Gunther from his historic reign as WWE Intercontinental Champion. Maxxine Dupri was verbally abused by Candice LeRae of all people. Also, it featured a war of words between World Heavyweight Champion Seth Rollins and Drew McIntyre.
I've said it in these introductions before and I'm sure I'll say them again, but when a show like "Raw" is three hours long, there's a lot to love and there's a lot to hate. So here is everything that the Wrestling Inc. staff felt was good and bad about Monday's show.
Loved: Sami Zayn wrestles three men in a gauntlet match while fasting (Samantha Schipman)
Sami Zayn faced three men in the gauntlet match on his way to securing a spot at "WrestleMania 40". He defeated Bronson Reed, Shinsuke Nakamura, and Chad Gable to earn his shot at GUNTHER's Intercontinental Championship.
As if defeating those three men in close succession (and after taking a splash from Reed after Zayn defeated him) wasn't enough, Zayn had another challenge. The observance of Ramadan has started. During this month, Muslims observe praying, fasting, community, and reflection. As part of fasting, people do not drink or eat during the daylight hours. They have a meal prior to sunrise and one following sunset.
Commentary brought up Zayn's observation the holy month to illustrate what he was facing. They didn't use it to make any excuses should Zayn be eliminated. Rather they used it to show that Zayn was balancing something his opponents didn't have to deal with.
Not being able to eat for hours prior to a match has a different effect for Zayn. As someone who has practiced Ramadan for years, Zayn has no doubt mastered how to balance fasting prior to matches. Even with years of practice, Zayn had the challenge of wrestling three men consecutively. And not just any three men, but three of the best. Additionally, Zayn had to factor in Reed's size. He was the first of three challengers. After taking a splash from a 300-pound man, he quickly wrestled two men in quick fashion. That requires stamina, strength, and mental clarity. When fasting, all three of those things can be harder to manage.
Winning an intense match with such important implications while observing the intensity of fasting makes Zayn's win even more impressive.
Hated: The Man In Name Only (Ross Berman)
Becky Lynch is set for a monumental clash with Rhea Ripley, which is why it's so weird that Becky's main story for the past couple of months has been with Nia Jax. She's also entangling herself with Liv Morgan more and more. Lynch is being stretched thinner and thinner over the course of WrestleMania season and it runs the risk of not only diluting her star power but deflating her upcoming match with Ripley.
It's bad enough that "Mami" vs. "The Man" is happening on such short notice that there's very little story to the build but it's worse that Lynch set for a far more narratively satisfying payoff next week in her Last Woman Standing Match against Jax. As the increasingly chaotic build to WrestleMania 40 continues, I can't help but wonder if saving Jax and Lynch for Mania, leaving room for the huge match with Ripley to breath at SummerSlam, would make the whole process a lot smoother.
Loved: WrestleMania XL gets its extra large ladder match (Daisy Ruth)
I personally am of the mindset that no WrestleMania in history should ever be without a ladder match. Now that the Money in the Bank briefcase is contested on its own premium live event, the announcement that there would be a match involving ladders and a championship had me excited, partially because it was unexpected on my end. It's even more exciting because it's a six-pack tag team ladder match for the Undisputed WWE Tag Team Championships – and that means twelve guys in the ring vying for the belts. That sounds like pandamonium and chaos, and as someone whose guilty pleasure match is the Money in the Bank ladder match of 2020, that's my kind of crazy.
Watching the video that accompanied Adam Pearce and Nick Aldis' announcement on "Raw," I came to realize just how stacked the men's tag team division is within WWE. From Legado del Fantasma, to the Creed Brothers, to my forever beloved New Day, and more, there are plenty of tag teams to fill up the coming weeks before WWE rolls in to Philadelphia. It's all kicking off next week on "Raw," and three qualifying matches are set already. New Day will take on Otis and Tozawa of Alpha Academy. DIY and the Creed Brothers will battle it out. Finally, the Miz and R-Truth, or the Awesome Truth, if you will, take on Indus Sher. If you ask me for my predictions, I'm taking New Day, the Creeds, and Truth and Miz to go on to the ladder match. Even with just the matches set for next week, if you go with these predictions, you have the insane ladder spots with Kingston, a potential star-making showing for the Creed brothers, and of course, R-Truth zany spots guaranteed to make anyone laugh. I like all of this so much already, and I can already tell it's going to be a WrestleMania highlight for me this year. What can I say, I'm a sucker for a gimmick match, especially when it involves climbing very tall things in the pursuit of gold.
I think WrestleMania is the perfect time and this is a perfect cluster of a situation to take the tag belts off Judgment Day and start a dissension storyline there moving into perhaps Backlash in France, but maybe even beyond that. With the Money in the Bank briefcase still on Priest, I feel like there are a ton of different directions you could go with Judgment Day, even without the tag titles. The possibilities for this match are endless and exciting, and I'm really looking forward to the coming weeks as well as the match itself at WrestleMania.
Hated: Seth Rollins and Drew McIntyre's World Heavyweight Championship Match at WrestleMania Isn't About Them (Olivia Quinlan)
Usually the closer WrestleMania gets, the more excited I am for the build of the storylines and the pay-per-view itself. However, this year seems to unfortunately have the opposite effect for me, especially with everything going on between Seth "Freakin" Rollins/Drew McIntyre/Cody Rhodes/The Bloodline.
Any World Championship defense at WrestleMania should be a big deal, with the co-main event World Heavyweight Championship match between Rollins and McIntyre at Night Two of the event, it just doesn't quite feel like that's the case. Every aspect of the build up to the match between them has felt like it's more about The Rock, Roman Reigns, Cody Rhodes, and the Undisputed WWE Universal Champion than the two of them and Rollins' title. The opening segment between them tonight in which McIntyre chastised Rollins for agreeing to tag with Rhodes at Night One of WrestleMania against The Rock and Roman Reigns did nothing except further cement that, and this wasn't helped when Cody Rhodes spent half of his interview with Michael Cole talking about why he was able to trust Rollins in said tag team match.
Rollins defending his title at WWE's biggest pay-per-view of the year should be the focus for him and his character irregardless of his alliance with Rhodes, yet said is not the case. His match the night prior to his defense has far overshadowed his match with McIntyre. Furthermore, it weakens McIntyre's legitimacy as a challenger since all he's done week in and week out is complain. Yes, a major part of McIntyre's character at the moment is blaming everyone else for things, but at a certain point, constantly doing it makes McIntyre look like a bit of a cry baby.
Loved: Vignettes for the IC Title Contenders (Jon Jordan)
It's WrestleMania season and we all know everybody wants a spot but there are just only so many to go around, which is why we usually have a couple of multi-person matches, The Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal (if that's still a thing) and stuff like that every year. But with the announcement of a Six-Pack Challenge Ladder Match for the Tag Team Championships, it looks like we've already checked the box for the multi-person car crash chaos of a match for this year — and that's what made the pre-taped vignettes we got for each of the six competitors in tonight's gauntlet match to determine GUNTHER's challenger for the Intercontinental Championship at WrestleMania so important.
This type of match should showcase each guy as much as possible, lest it get lost for all but the winner, and since only one of them could go onto WrestleMania, one simple way to do that is a little pre-production. And I dig it. A little backstory for all of Ricochet, Shinsuke Nakamura, Sami Zayn, JD McDonagh, "Big" Bronson Reed, and Chad Gable puts some shine on their current characters and what they've done to get to this point. Pair that with some of the company they placed alongside these gentlemen, former Intercontinental titleholders like "Macho Man" Randy Savage, Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart, The Rock, Triple H, Mr. Perfect, and so on and so forth (and yep, did you catch AEW's Chris Jericho in there too? It wasn't too long ago that his likeness or even a namedrop was conspicuously absent when they did something similar to hype up GUNTHER approaching the record for longest reign).
In the end, Zayn, who entered third outlasted the rest of the field by knocking off Reed (and eating a Tsunami for his trouble), Nakamura, and Gable in a barnburner of a finale, and will challenge "The Ring General" at Mania. But thanks to some added production on top of an entertaining effort from all, all five of these participants got at least a little bit of extra attention — and deservedly so.
Hated: Maxxine Dupri, Candice LaRae deserve better (Daisy Ruth)
I feel like I need to start this out by saying I have really enjoyed Maxxine's work since she linked up with Chad Gable and Otis and ditched the whole Maximum Male Models thing. Of course, she's green. She hasn't had many singles matches, or just straight-up any kind of match, on the main roster. But, that's her gimmick. She's learning from Gable, Otis, and now, Ivy Nile. I really like that and you can see that she's trying and enjoys what she does. Well, I suppose most of us can see that, except the rude fans who berated poor Maxxine recently at a house show. As a ticket-buying fan attending these shows, I obviously encourage booing and cheering of whoever you like, whether you're cheering a heel, booing a face, or what have you. But if you've seen these social media videos of the "fans," and I use that term loosely, telling this poor woman to "not come back," you've crossed a line of being straight-up rude to another human being who is trying her best and is putting her body on the line to go out there and entertain the masses, whether she's what you deem "good enough" or not. There's a real person behind the character, and I think some of these people in attendance at shows tend to forget that.
So, to have Candice LaRae turn heel on Maxxine and scream in her face in the ring during LaRae and Indi Hartwell's match against Maxxine and Nile, was just uncomfortable. Her telling Maxxine she wasn't good enough and she didn't belong there was just kind of gross, knowing what Maxxine probably felt getting berated by fans the other week. LaRae even went as far as to say to Maxxine that what the women in the locker room say about her is worse, and it just, as the kids say, straight up gave me the ick. Of course, I know it's all a storyline, but it's one of those real-life instances that I think WWE didn't need to put in a storyline to begin with. At least in this regime of WWE, I would think it was okayed by Maxxine before they decided to run with it, but I suppose these days, you never know.
For LaRae, this heel turn seems to be a testament to just how weak the women's tag team division is in WWE. Her heel turn was pretty out of left field to me, like they just needed a different story to spice up the division, and threw it on to LaRae, who's always been depicted as a babyface in fairy wings, for no particular reason. She doesn't even have a heel look to me, overall. I guess I have to see how this plays out. It certainly won't be at WrestleMania in a little over three weeks, that's for sure, unless these women get a spot on the pre-show. With now writing out that sentence, I think WWE should do that, and give Maxxine her flowers for learning and growing in the most difficult way, trial by fire, and for LaRae a payoff to this turn.