The Vince McMahon elephant in the room
WWE is walking on thin ice with recent references to Vince McMahon during Monday Night Raw. It felt like a calculated gamble to see just how much the audience would tolerate before the boos drowned out the entrance music. Bully Ray captured the vibe perfectly, noting that the company essentially took the temperature of the room to gauge if they could lean into that history without triggering a full-blown PR disaster.
Is it meta-commentary or just bad taste? It felt like the latter during that segment with Cody Rhodes and Stephanie McMahon. As noted in recent breakdowns, the allusion was the only thing giving the opening segment any teeth, yet it leaves a sour aftertaste. Relying on the ghost of the past to generate heat is a parlor trick that gets old fast.
The brass knuckles of doom
The officiating during the recent no-disqualification bouts is driving me up the wall. We saw a messy situation where the lack of rules essentially rendered the match a parody of itself. If you promote a no-DQ match and then look baffled when someone produces brass knuckles, you are failing the audience on a fundamental level.
It is not just about the rules — it is about keeping the logic consistent. When you have top-tier workers like Reigns and Punk, you do not need to rely on tired, clunky interference tactics to hide a lack of booking ideas. It feels like we are watching a promotion that has forgotten how to build a clean finish.
Looking back at how we got here
History has a funny way of repeating itself in this business. Back in the day, the vibe after huge shows was entirely different; people knew when they had hit a home run. Brian Solomon recently recalled the aftermath of WrestleMania X-Seven, which was basically the Goldberg of wrestling shows—undisputed, clean, and never surpassed. Even comedic legends like Bobby Heenan were chasing Vince around the afterparty trying to secure their future.
Those stories are legendary, but they reflect a different era. Today, the backstage anxiety feels rooted in corporate optics rather than just pure ego or booking success. They are polishing the marquee for WrestleMania 41, but the lingering shadow of past management is a strange choice to highlight when you are trying to project a shiny, new image to the world.
The booking blind spots
The women's tag team division currently feels like an afterthought, and it is infuriating. You have talent sitting on the bench while the screen time goes to recycled segments that revolve around corporate history. It is a massive waste of resources.
We have got 17 days until WrestleMania 41 kicks off in Philadelphia. If the creative team cannot figure out how to pivot from these awkward, meta, wink-to-the-camera references toward actual storytelling, the crowd might just start looking at their phones instead of the ring. Fix the booking, drop the baggage, and give us a reason to care about the actual finishes.
