People (read: Kevin Owens and The Miz) trying to leave the arena as quickly as possible after pissing off Braun Strowman might sneakily be the best part of the Strowman Experience, as it’s one of the few times that there seem to be genuine stakes in wrestling without a title being involved. Braun is such an overwhelming force that he literally changes the way the entire WWE ecosystem works. He can do whatever he wants — whether it be flipping over an ambulance, a semi-trailer or the entire backstage lighting rig — so neither hiding behind management nor standing your ground is really an option if you’d done fucked up Strowman-style. So, when you’re a coward who comes up agains him, you’ll probably want to GTFO Dodge and will use pretty much any excuse to do so. Which is how you end up with bits like this:
https://twitter.com/totaldivaseps/status/1001261549753946112
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I don’t even have a clever joke or attempt at insightful analysis for this. If you don’t like Elias, you better learn to love him, because he’s the best thing going:
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The second best thing going is, of course, Seth Fucking Rollins. While it’s often said that a great worker can get a good match out of a broom, getting out a decent match out of Jinder Mahal has been much harder. Although Mahal is talented in the ring, has a strong character which he wrestles fairly well to and treats every match like it might be the last one on this run, because the crowd finds him nondescriptly terrible every match feels like it’s happening underwater. But with the hot streak Rollins has been on since before WrestleMania, he was able to get a match that — while not a five-star classic, or even a solid three-star paint-by-the-numbers affair — at least got a reaction from the crowd. Even if it was just for him mollywhopping Sunil Singh and Jinder with a chair at the top of the ramp.
The end for Seth and Jinder, however, seems to be a beautiful new beginning to what may end up being my favorite program of 2018: Seth Rollins vs. Elias for the future of Elias’s career. While he’s not Jinder Mahal in the ring (something I largely as compliment to Jinder,) Elias is the only person who has nearly as much non-Strowman (who is in-and-of-himself a whole different world) presence as Rollins does right now. It’s also once again time to thank The Miz for making the IC belt matter, which allows us to have a feud between one of the best performers of his generation and the hottest young star (Elias is a year younger than I am) on the roster where they are actually fighting for something of value. Instead of, you know, a prop that let’s us know which of the two is going to lose every match on free TV.
