WWE RAW HITS & MISSES (5/11): Oba Femi Open Challenge, AAA Mega Title Build, Vision vs. Street Profits & Hendry, Rusev vs. Evans, Asuka’s Goodbye

The Vision vs. Street Profits & Hendry – HIT: This is a minor Hit. The opening segment was ok. Roman Reigns came off as a bit of a jerk. The mic work from The Vision was ok. It set up this opening six-man tag match well enough. The match was pretty good. It was nice to see the Street Profits in the ring after a long hiatus. The ending with Seth Rollins getting involved was highly telegraphed by Bron Breakker. He was way over the top in telling Austin Theory to distract the referee so that he could run around to the other side of the ring to spear his opponent. He wasn’t the legal man in the match, so he needed to have the referee distracted, but the illegal members of a team attack the legal opponents all the time in front of the referee. The only reason he did it here, was because Rollins was going to cheat and attack him. It was too choreographed and convenient. But, the match was good enough with the ending putting more heat between Rollins and the Profits. I’m not sure where that is going.

Build Towards the Main Event – HIT: While I don’t care at all about AAA or their Mega Championship, and while I hate the mask vs. mask El Grande Americanos feud, WWE did a nice job of making this Mega Championship match between Dominik Mysterio and Chad Gable feel like a big deal. After their initial backstage encounter which led to the match, we saw some nice video packages throughout the show about the history of the Title and what it means to both wrestlers. I was never going to care about the match, but they did a nice job nonetheless.

Rusev vs. Evans – MISS: The set up for this match wasn’t great and the fans were sitting on their hands. They sounded dead for most of the show if I’m being honest. I’m a fan of all four of the wrestlers involved, particularly Penta, Je’Von Evans, and Ethan Page. I feel like Rusev and Evans could have a good match against each other. But, this match didn’t click for me. Rusev was on offense for far too long. It started to grind to a halt at times. I get the idea of having Rusev dominate to make Evans’ comeback stronger. But, it didn’t make for an exciting match. I kept wanting to see Evans do more of his cool offense. He got in a few moves here and there and the ending was strong. But, overall it didn’t do much for me.

Goodbye Asuka – MISS: The murkiness surrounding Asuka’s future isn’t making for great TV. The idea that she and Iyo Sky hugged after their great Backlash match didn’t make sense given their storyline. Their backstage encounter on Raw helped a bit, but then Asuka just left with no real explanation. Is she retired? A free agent? Moving back to Japan to keep wrestling? They were far too friendly with each other after the heated build to their match. And now she’s just gone, without any type of goodbye to the fans, or a tribute video or anything.

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Ruca vs. Sky – MISS: In other circumstances, this match would have definitely been a Hit. The wrestling action and the effort put in by both Sol Ruca and Iyo Sky was certainly Hit-worthy. But, why was this match happening at all? Why was this Ruca’s Raw in ring debut? Why not start her off with a win? I get that this gave Becky Lynch some fuel to mock Ruca, but that isn’t a good enough reason to job her out on her Raw debut. After she botched the Sol Snatcher against Lynch in her contract signing segment last week, I would think WWE would want to actually fully establish her finisher by having her hit it several times in winning efforts, before doing the spot they did here with Sky avoiding it and countering it into a leverage pin for the win. That was a cool spot, but fans who aren’t as familiar with Ruca who don’t watch NXT haven’t even seen her hit the move correctly yet. I loved the action in this match, but I have to give it a Miss for the circumstances.

Oba Femi – MISS: WWE needs to pivot away from this open challenge and give Oba Femi a feud with an established heel wrestler soon. I didn’t like that the entire roster is already afraid to accept his open challenge after just one week. I didn’t like how Femi was a jerk to the Garzas who hadn’t done anything to deserve being beat up. All they did was show up on Raw hoping for an opportunity. They didn’t act like heels at all. But, Femi just decided to beat the crap out of them. They need to do something quickly to better capitalize on his huge win over Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania.

Mysterio vs. Gable – MISS: The wrestling action was good in this match, and as I mentioned earlier, WWE did a nice job of building to it throughout the show. But, it is still another Title which they expect me to care about when they have far too many Titles between Raw and Smackdown already (in addition to NXT and Evolve too). And the Gable vs. Ludwig Kaiser feud continues to make no sense whatsoever. They arena’t even trying to tell a story that makes sense. Throw in the constant interference and distractions with the various fake luchadores at ringside, and I couldn’t care about the match at all.

Reigns – Fatu – HIT: Raw wasn’t very good, but the ending was strong. I liked this chapter between Roman Reigns and Jacob Fatu more than some of the other recent ones. They had a very good PLE main event, and this was a nice way to follow up on it. Jimmy & Jey Uso were good in their part, trying to convince Roman that Fatu would never acknowledge him and trying to stop Fatu from attacking their cousin. The physicality was good with Fatu ultimately getting the better of Reigns, putting him through the announce table to end the show.

(Jon Mezzera is PWTorch.com’s WWE Raw Hits & Misses Specialist, providing his point of view for Raw each week. Email him at jmezz_torch@yahoo.com. Follow him on BlueSky @jonmezzera.bsky.social.)