The biggest winners and losers from Extreme Rules 2018

Extreme Rules 2018 is mercifully over. As expected, it was filler, but not just an ordinary filler. It was a catastrophe. An embarrassment. A damning indictment of a creative process that only seems to get worse as time goes on.

This company should be embarrassed, ashamed, and humiliated at the poor show it put on last night. In my opinion, this event was even worse than Backlash. At least Backlash had the awesome opener between Seth Rollins and The Miz. This had almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Almost every match fell short of expectations, and the booking was, as we should expect in 2018, dismal.

One bump out of four hours doesn't make for a good pay per view, sorry. SummerSlam doesn't look so endearing now, does it?

Nevertheless, were there any winners that managed to come out of this pile of garbage?

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Losers: Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt

Remember when everyone wanted the broken gimmick in WWE? Yeah, look how that turned out.

Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt hardly set the world on fire as the Raw Tag Team Champions, but this was a total burial. First, Hardy loses to both members of the "B Team," who had been portrayed as comedy jobbers even into this feud, and then the team loses at the PPV.

That was against expectations, but expectations were put in place because they made sense. This didn't make any sense at all.

Logic would indicate that the "B Team" are just keeping the championships warm for the Authors of Pain to demolish them at SummerSlam, but as we saw last night, logic is not this company's first language. As it stands, we have no idea how this will go.

Loser: Baron Corbin

Baron Corbin was gaining some relevance back, if slowly, in his role as "constable" on Raw. Start/stop booking then roared again as Finn Balor, despite being dominated for the entire match, rolled Baron Corbin up and got the win from nowhere?

To what end? Do we really need to see the feud continue and more matches between these two?

That's probably what we'll wind up getting, regardless, where Baron Corbin gets his win back. Just filling TV time, as usual.

Loser: Asuka

"Loser" is an understatement. This was a burial close to what Bayley experienced last year. Asuka is officially done as someone who had any special mystique. She's just another dumb babyface on the roster now.

All for the sake of putting over Carmella, who the company doesn't even trust to wrestle a three-minute match, and with James Ellsworth as the spotlight.

This wasn't just bad. It was a disgrace. And Carmella's reign just went from awful to indefensible. The company clearly doesn't see their female talent as anything more than Divas. Just bring the old butterfly belt back and make it official.

Winners: Shinsuke Nakamura and Randy Orton

Shinsuke Nakamura badly needed this win, and it's what he got. What was surprising was how quickly he beat Jeff Hardy. The guy must be pretty banged up. Randy Orton made his return as well, and with it, a much-needed heel turn. What this does with him going forward is still up in the air.

As long as Nakamura isn't given the tired anti-American foreign heel act, his reign has a lot of promise and can give his career the second-wind it's needed.

Loser: Daniel Bryan

So let me get this straight. You have an "injured" Kane who will be departing soon to seek political office, and you decide to have Team Hell No lose to the Bludgeon Brothers, only for Daniel Bryan to get pinned?

Sure, that's about as sensible as nearly everything else that happened on this show.

This definitely felt like an inducement of sorts for Daniel Bryan to re-sign with the company, but after seeing this show, does he really want to?

Loser: Roman Reigns

This was a huge win for Bobby Lashley, but an even bigger loss for Roman Reigns. He once again fell short in a big match, and this basically makes his burial complete. Whatever shred of credibility he had in big match situations is now completely gone.

On the one hand, this was the right call, as no one wanted to see Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns for the fourth time, in Brooklyn of all places. At the same time, Roman Reigns really needed to beat Brock Lesnar before he left for UFC to save any semblance of face.

The future is still up in the air, but this is just the latest example of the terrible fallout that came from the decision to have Roman Reigns lose at WrestleMania. If the company has decided to pull the plug, that's fine. But if this holding pattern somehow continues, it's not.

Losers: Nia Jax and Ronda Rousey

Not to be outdone by its SmackDown counterpart, the Raw Divas division saw possibly the worst "extreme rules" match in recent memory last night. The bumps were unconvincing, the interference from Ronda Rousey led to nothing, and Alexa Bliss still somehow managed to retain her title while making everyone look stupid.

The better call would be for Ronda Rousey to jump the barricade and chase the champion out of the arena after her victory, but that obviously strayed too much from WWE's rote, formulaic booking style.

As a result, the feud with Bliss started off colder than it should.

Winner: Rusev

This match was the one good thing about this show. Though it was no match of the year candidate, it did its job. AJ Styles retained the championship as expected, but Rusev looked great in defeat, establishing more credibility than he's had in a long time.

It came several months too late. He's much colder now than he was at the start of the year, but it was nice to see all the same. Hopefully, he'll get some more opportunities to show what he can do in the future.

Losers: Dolph Ziggler and Seth Rollins

Infamously, the crowd hijacked this match, proving that Roman Reigns isn't the only victim of this tendency.

The match itself, however, also fell flat compared to what it could have been. It was overbooked, with a contrived ending. Dolph Ziggler gained no favors from this contest, and, cynically, it looks like it was booked this way only to cool off the red-hot Seth Rollins.

With a spam of falls and the overbooked ending, and following the poor show that preceded it, one almost can't blame the fans for turning on it, and the entire show.