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Disclaimer: This article is the opinion of the author and doesn't necessarily represent Sportskeeda's views
Raw is, theoretically, the most important wrestling television show worldwide and 2018 was a year for celebration for the red brand as they celebrated their 25th anniversary with a very special (and disappointing?) show. But not everything was good on Monday nights —the ratings are extremely poor this past weeks—, so let's analyse the reason for Raw's failure last year.
3 hours
Firstly, we have to consider the three hours of the show: good for money and advertisement, bad for the fans. In the case the content was perfect, this everlasting length does not let the spectator enjoy the show properly either. Plus, staying three whole hours in front of the television is complicated (people have other things to do) and in other places of the world (specially Asia, Europe...), where the time zone is so different, is not amusing to stay awake until the early hours of the morning when you can see the show's highlights on other platforms the following day.
Champion absence
Where is the champion? Brock Lesnar has been the Universal Champion almost the entire year and when we finally got a fighting champion in Roman Reigns he had to relinquish the title, unfortunately. Not only Raw's world champion does not appear in his show, but he does not wrestle in most of the pay-per-views. At every most, the red roster fight for secondary titles (Seth Rollins and Dolph Ziggler did a great job) and for a random tag team match, because the Universal Championship was restricted to Lesnar, Reigns and Strowman.
Irrelevance
We cannot forget to talk about how irrelevant are the shows. Some years ago, every single Raw was significant as a lot of things that affected the storylines happened. This is not the case nowadays. If you cannot watch Raw one week it is not a big deal: anything interesting is going to happen and you can watch it next week without any problem. Not many rivalries are developed on screen and, in addition, those are more interesting on social networks.
Raw is also repetitive. How many times we watch Ziggler vs. Rollins, Alexa as champion, Sasha and Bayley love/hate segments, the same random matches every week (and even in pay-per-views)...
WWE Universe do not get what they want
Not giving the fans what they demand has been a very common mistake made by WWE in 2018 in the red brand. Baron Corbin reign of terror (and boredom) was the straw that broke the camel's back. After giving us Roman (finally!) as Universal Champion, a champion who would be in every show, and Ronda —a fan favourite— as Women's Champion at SummerSlam we were a little bit happier. However, when the world championship was vacant, instead of giving the title to Braun Strowman, WWE trolled us one more time crowning Brock Lesnar again.
The next Superstar Shake-Up will be decisive for the red brand's future because Raw desperately needs some new faces and fresh rivalries and matches that make us want to watch WWE on Monday nights again.
What would you change on Raw? Post your opinion in the comments below!
