What to Expect From Tonight’s Raw

With Survivor Series and its immediate fallout in the books, the Raw roster looks forward to its next brand-exclusive pay-per-view Roadblock: End of the Line, which takes place on December 18th. A number of big feuds hit their conclusion in October at Hell in a Cell, which means its now time for Raw to transition to a new set of stories and matchups. Here’s what to expect tonight.

Roman Reigns and Kevin Owens have been main eventing on the house show circuit in United States Championship matches–a convenient excuse for Roman to get a clean victory over the Universal Champ. The venue for Roadblock is already advertising a Reigns/Owens main event, so expect the pair to clash on Raw very soon. A repeat of their house show matches on TV is very likely, with Roman defending his US Title to set up a contest for the Universal Championship at the PPV.

Seth Rollins, then, is expected to transition into a feud with Chris Jericho in time for a Roadblock match. This may not all happen tonight, but expect the seeds to be sown for these matches over the next few weeks.

What’s confirmed for tonight are a pair of big title matches. Charlotte defends the Women’s Championship in her North Carolina hometown against Sasha Banks, and it’ll be very interesting to see how the champ tries to play the heel this deep in Flair country. It would seem ridiculous if Sasha won back the title here, but every title change between this pair has seemed out of nowhere–regardless of how good the matches have been–so I’m not even going to try and offer a prediction here.

The other title match sees the New Day defending the Tag Team Championships against Luke Gallows & Karl Anderson. The New Day is inching ever closer to breaking Demolition’s record 478-day reign as tag champs, and they’ll be successful if they can manage to hold onto the titles through Roadblock. Anderson & Gallows may be the ones to end that reign, but it’s doubtful they’ll do it before the record is broken.

You can also expect a heavy focus on the Cruiserweight division, as WWE attempts to reignite interest ahead of the debut of the new show 205 Live on Tuesday. The division has obviously been struggling, so expect redoubled efforts to get the lightweight competitors over in front of the main roster crowd.

Finally, WWE.com is promoting the continued feud between Enzo & Cass and Rusev following last week’s “revealing” encounter between Enzo and Lana. It seems that the next step will be a singles match between Big Cass and Rusev at the PPV, so expect that feud to heat up tonight.

Raw broadcasts as always at 8PM Eastern/7PM Central on the USA Network, and we’ll have live coverage of everything as it happens. Join us then!