During Monday’s episode of Raw, a tag title match was set up that led to Seth Rollins and Buddy Murphy becoming the new Raw tag team champions.
Rollins & Murphy defeated The Viking Raiders after challenging the reigning champions earlier in the night with the Raiders aligning themselves with Kevin Owens and Samoa Joe.
The match went 11:04 with the finish occurring after Rollins shoved Ivar off the turnbuckle and landed back first on the edge of the apron. From there, Murphy struck Erik with a knee, he was draped on the bottom rope and was hit with the stomp from Rollins leading to Murphy getting the cover.
The switch ends the Vikings Raiders’ three-month reign as champions after winning them last October. It is the sixth time that Rollins has won the Raw version of the tag titles with past partners including Roman Reigns, Dean Ambrose, Jason Jordan, and Braun Strowman.
During Murphy’s tenure with WWE, he has previously held the NXT tag titles with Wesley Blake and was the WWE Cruiserweight champion from October 2018 until last April.
But I’m rather pleased to see Murphy used in this capacity. I fell asleep before feedback, but I do like how they used Murphy and Black to do a low-card feud for a few weeks on TV and then upon the blow off, aligned Murphy with somebody higher on the card essentially elevating him. Did not feel out of nowhere, and makes sense for the character who lost the feud to side with heels.
Now what they do with Black will be interesting because there is somebody I would love to see in a prominent mid-card match (thinking between matches 4 and 9) at Mania. Almost like the Drew spot from last year.
I will extend this compliment of booking lower card guys on Raw in the past 3 months to Humberto & Mysterio. We saw Humberto come on the scene, it felt weird, they wrote him off, but brought him back in a logical sense last night and even had a call back to his initial story for being taken out. I actually would have preferred this angle take place at Rumble in a big setting for the maximum impact of such a return, but it was fine and I like the strategy used for a few of these guys to make them seem more elevated with a) story and b) aligning them with stars.
It seemed weird at first but if you think about Rollins elevates those belts more than AOP would and I don’t really see him or Murphy in singles title contention soon with Brock and Andrade holding those belts.
As much as I hate the WWE model of making singles stars always better than tag teams that matchup is more interesting in just about every way then AOP vs Viking Raiders at this point. I mean it is 4 guys with personality in a match vs 4 big guys who are basically personified gimmicks.
Last night was a good 2 hour show. If they cut hour 3 entirely it would have been a very good show. I’m beginning to wonder if they put on what they do hour 3 to lead into the program following RAW on USA. Which has been Miz and Mrs…so trashy reality TV, soon to be Biggest Loser, more reality TV. Like maybe they feel that people are tuning in a bit early and might catch the soap opera drama and get hooked. I watched some highlights of last night, then after listening to the podcast watched just 2 hours and was pretty pleased.