I've been watching wrestling for more than 20 years now, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a good battle royal. That's not to say it can't be done, but it's hard; one of the reasons the Royal Rumble match has been such a success over the years and decades is because it provides much-needed structure to a type of match that too often becomes formless and incoherent, particularly given the time constraints of TV. This week's battle royal on "WWE Raw" was unfortunately more of the usual, and while it's undeniable that the right person won, it's unclear to me why we had to take such a boring path to get there.
Don't get me wrong, there was some storytelling going on. Pure Fusion Collective got into it with Katana Chance and Kayden Carter, Ivy Nile eliminated her old friend Maxxine Dupri and was eliminated in turn by her latest rival, Zelina Vega, and the WWE Women's Tag Team Champions straight-up got pulled out of the ring by Liv Morgan and Raquel Rodriguez, who weren't in the match. That said, everyone else was just kind of there, including the runner-up, Lyra Valkyria, who WWE doesn't seem to want to do anything with aside from having her finish in second place. Even IYO SKY, who won the damn thing, didn't really have anything going on in this match from a story perspective, especially because the person holding the title she's now going to challenge for is apparently feuding with the tag champs instead.
And beyond all that, why are we even doing a battle royal anyway? We just finished mini-tournaments to determine No. 1 contenders for both sets of men's tag titles, and the same thing happened for the Intercontinental and United States titles recently, too. Can we not just do the same thing for the women, run a few triple threats and get some decent matches out of it? You'd get even more storytelling opportunities that way, too. Not sure why WWE punted on that option in favor of a battle royal, of all things -- did they just really want the optics of having the entire "Raw" women's roster wrestle in Saudi Arabia?
Oh, and by the way, just give IYO the belt. Enough is enough with this Morgan run; Rhea Ripley is out of action and we need a champion who actually defends. If it's me, I'm strapping up SKY again and giving Morgan and Rodriguez the women's tag titles, which are much better suited to what they do on "Raw" and frees up Bianca Belair and Jade Cargill to be singles wrestlers again. It's almost election day; end our long national nightmare.