Thoughts on Raw, Aug. 4

I had thought about doing a detail review of last night's Raw and had it half-done when I realized that I was saying that exact same thing over and over. Truth is, every single thing that was wrong with Monday's show was wrong for the exact same reason: the WWE's refusal to build.

Let's just look at SummerSlam's card for a second. Going into Monday, we had a grand total of four matches scheduled and only one match from Raw and that match, Cena vs. Batista, was announced at the very end of last week's show. Let me say that again: leading up to SummerSlam, which is supposed to be the second-biggest PPV of the year, every single match from the #1 brand has, at the most, two weeks of actual build. Two weeks! This is SummerSlam, the major matches should have at least two months of build with the match on Aug. 17th being the big feud-ending blowoff.

Nowhere on Raw was this attitude more prevalent than in the main event though. Here we have the tag champs, two young arrogant heels looking to make a name for themselves. DiBiase even got approval from Cena himself in a recent interview, saying that the Priceless One could be headlining WrestleMania in less than five years. So do we build them up and have them feud with another young team in a program designed to elevate them both and the tag titles at the same time? Nope, we job them out to two guys who haven't needed the titles in years, have no experience tagging with each other and won't even get into a feud with another team because they're busy feuding with each other with the titles holding as much prestige as Cena's jean shorts. This makes the titles look like shit, DiBiase and Rhodes look like shit and there is absolutely nothing good that can come from this. It was crap when they did it with Cena and HBK, it was crap when they did it with Matt Hardy and MVP, it was crap the 13541 times that TNA's done it and it's crap now.

Like I said before, pretty much the entire WWE product is suffering because of this attitude. Pretty much the only feud that's gotten time is Mark Henry vs. Matt Hardy and they're on the C-show fighting for a belt that's means barely as much as the IC or US titles. And no matter how bad the ratings get, they just won't clue into the fact that this attitude is killing the product. People don't watch TV shows to see the Big Bad get defeated in the third episode and the Hero and Lancer fighting for the rest of the season while still being good guys. Why would people want to watch this?

On the plus side, Adamle was good, didn't really botch anything and got himself a new catchphrase. Too bad creative botched more last night than Adamle has in his career.