The go-home RAW for Bad Blood delivered throughout. Drew McIntyre and CM Punk cut dueling promos inside a steel cell. The Miz turned his back on R-Truth. Braun Strowman and Bronson Reed destroyed everything in sight, with Seth Rollins returning to help Strowman win the Last Monster Standing match. This was also the final three-hour episode of RAW until the move to Netflix occurs. What will this mean for the show for the final three months of the year?
What gets cut?
Two options are available. Either the upper card programs get the same attention at the cost of lower card feuds’ screentime, or everyone’s screentime goes down. For reference, here is every angle that was on the show:
- Jey Uso as the Intercontinental Champion (new challenger TBD)
- Xavier Woods’ slow-burn heel turn (featuring Kofi Kingston, Rey Mysterio, and more)
- The Pure Fusion Collective feuding with Lyra Valkyria
- The mysterious individual (or group) with the “RPF” emblem
- CM Punk vs. Drew McIntyre
- The collapse of the Awesome Truth (again)
- Sami Zayn vs. Gunther
- The Judgment Day vs. LWO
- Damian Priest vs. Finn Balor
- Rhea Ripley vs. Liv Morgan
- Sheamus vs. Pete Dunne
- The Wyatt Sicks
- Bronson Reed vs. Braun Strowman
- Seth Rollins’ return, likely settling the score with Reed
That’s thirteen angles, with more perhaps in the works and others potentially combining. For the sake of arbitrary numbers, this study will be used as a basis. RAW will be 120 minutes moving forward, but there are, on average, 16.12 minutes of commercials per hour. Multiply that by two and it’s around 32 minutes of commercials, meaning these angles will have 88 minutes to work with.
If each angle was treated equally, that would give everybody around 6.8 minutes to work with. This likely means some feuds lower on the card will be checked in on periodically rather than constantly developed week-to-week. Already, there are two title matches and a “Good Ol’ Fashioned Donnybrook Match” (one of the many ways of saying “no disqualification”) booked for next week.
These matches likely take up at least fifteen minutes per. In addition, a post-Bad Blood promo from one of CM Punk or Drew McIntyre is more than likely, in addition to anything in related to the Terror Twins and Judgment Day. The lower midcard will have less time to work with and some of its matches don’t even get ten minutes.
It will be great for WWE fans on the East coast’s sleep schedules, but the challenge now lies in the hands of the New Days and Braun Strowmans to make what they can out of the limited time on screen they get. Perhaps the question turns from “what can these wrestlers do with less time” to “what can’t they do with the time allotted?”
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