Tommy Dreamer came away from Monday’s Raw in Detroit with the same thought that has followed WWE all summer: almost everyone at the top of the card is getting cheered, and he is not sure the old rules apply anymore.
Breaking down the show on Busted Open After Dark, Dreamer said the Detroit episode had an unusual feel two weeks out from SummerSlam.
“Tonight’s show was different, and by different, it was not bad. I thought we’d get more,” Dreamer said. “It was a little weird, and it was a little, I don’t know, didn’t have main character feel, but it also shows the depth of the roster today.”
The root of it, in his view, is how babyface-heavy the SummerSlam card is.
“You look at SummerSlam. Three matches on this card are technically babyface, babyface, maybe even four,” Dreamer said, running through Oba Femi and Brock Lesnar, Cody Rhodes and CM Punk, Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns, and Chad Gable and Penta. “Everybody has a different angle, different spin.”
He kept circling back to how the crowd refuses to boo anyone in those programs, using the Saturday Night’s Main Event closing angle as his example.
“Seth walked out with Tyrese Haliburton in Madison Square Garden. He attacked Roman, and then he’s going to step up to Jalen Brunson, and then Roman hits him, and it’s just like cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer, cheer,” Dreamer said. “It’s an interesting place right now in the WWE, but you can’t say it’s not working.”
The Raw main event, LA Knight against Jacob Fatu, left him with the same question. When Jey Uso’s music hit to break up the postmatch chaos, the crowd went wild for another babyface running in on babyfaces.
“You have to throw old school psychology away, and if it’s just we’re gonna cheer, cheer, cheer, the babyfaces laid out the other babyfaces. They started to boo a little,” Dreamer said. “Who do you think the heels and the babyfaces are in this storyline?”
He was mildly critical of Knight’s promo in the middle of it.
“LA Knight’s promo kinda was eh, in the sense of maybe a little too catchphrasy, maybe a little bit too the people are behind him, but they’re also behind the other guys,” Dreamer said. “I don’t know. It’s kind of bizarro world for me.”
Where Dreamer landed was that the confusion is a good problem, because it let WWE spotlight its next wave. He praised the show for giving time to acts like Joe Hendry, Danhausen, Je’Von Evans and the newly established Vision pairing of Austin Theory and Maxxine Dupri, and singled out one man as the hottest act in the company.
“Oba is on fire. Oba is the guy right now, and how you keep that momentum is really, really interesting,” Dreamer said. He credited JD McDonagh for taking a backdrop that got Femi over in their segment. “JD McDonagh should get a nice little bonus for how great he helped get Oba over.”
His one genuine question mark for SummerSlam is whether even Femi will draw boos against Brock Lesnar in their Hell in a Cell match.
“Oba and Brock is my only question mark, because I’m saying, will they boo Oba? Because pretty much everyone gets cheered, especially on the Raw brand,” Dreamer said.
He said the real measures will come later, with the caveat that the usual one is gone now that Raw is on Netflix.
“You can’t say it’s not working because you have 11,000 strong. The Garden sold a lot of tickets,” Dreamer said. “Your test of where you want to go with all this will obviously be SummerSlam. Is this working, with about two weeks to go?”
