The Monday Night Raw scramble

If you were hoping for a refined, tactical buildup to this weekend's festivities, I have some bad news for you. The creative team gave us a tag team sprint on Raw featuring four of the six participants in the upcoming Intercontinental Championship Ladder Match. Je’Von Evans and Dragon Lee managed to pick up a win over Rusev and JD McDonagh, but the finish was just appetizers for the main course. It is the classic pre-PPV trope where everyone eats a finisher just to keep the lights on for one more night.

Rusev standing tall is the weirdest flex of 2026

Here is where the wrestling community starts losing its collective mind. Rusev takes the pin from a Dragon Lee flying knee, yet stands tall to close the segment while the winners scurry off. Look, I get the need to frame someone as a threat heading into a high-stakes match, but looking strong after taking a clean loss in a tag match feels like 2012-era booking logic. It leaves me wondering why we even bother keeping score on Monday nights.

"If you think Rusev standing tall after eating a pin is stupid, remember this is the same company that thinks a 50/50 win-loss record makes a star."

That sentiment is echoing across every Discord server I frequent. Some fans are absolutely convinced that this is a subtle hint toward Rusev grabbing the strap on Sunday. Others, specifically the ones who haven't slept since the Royal Rumble, are screaming that it is an insult to the viewers' intelligence. You have the purists arguing that a pin is a pin, and you have the contrarians claiming that the post-match beatdown is effectively the only thing that matters in the grand scheme of the narrative.

Is the Intercontinental Ladder Match overbooked?

When you dump six guys into a ladder match, you are essentially asking for a chaotic car crash. I love a good spot-fest, but this Raw segment made the whole affair feel like a random draw at a pub rather than a calculated title pursuit. According to recent reports on the match dynamics, the goal was to showcase individual styles, but it just came off as a messy rehearsal. We are less than a week away from WrestleMania 41 and I still cannot figure out if the writing room knows who their hero is supposed to be.

My take? The bias is leaning heavily toward the guys who can take the biggest bump from the top. If JD McDonagh is the one pulling out a high-risk spot at the 18-minute mark, I’ll forgive the sloppy booking. If we get a slow-paced crawl to the finish, someone in the Gorilla position needs to have a very long, very loud conversation with the agents. We don't need heat-less tag matches to tell us that gravity works differently for these guys. Just let the bell ring and get out of the way.

The final verdict

The community is split, but the consensus is leaning toward pure apathy regarding how we reach showtime. Fans are tired of the repetitive segments where A beats B, then C interrupts, then D stands tall. It is a carousel of mediocrity preventing us from actually getting excited about the gold. If WrestleMania 41 delivers, nobody will care about this Rusev spot from Monday, but that is a massive if given the current pace.