It has been several months since WWE invoked the brand split, which gave Monday Night Raw and SmackDown Live their own respective rosters. In a general sense, this has been an overwhelming positive. SmackDown has purpose, two shows a week no longer feels stale, and more Superstars are getting big opportunities. Along with the tag team divisions (which we’ll get to another time), the brand split has seen its worst effects in Monday Night Raw’s women’s division.
On paper, Raw should be in pretty good shape when it comes to the women on their show. WWE.com lists the division as including Alicia Fox, Bayley, Charlotte, Dana Brooke, Emma (who actually isn’t listed on the Raw roster but that’s just assumed to be a mistake), Nia Jax, Paige, Sasha Banks, and Summer Rae. While there are nine women on their roster, Raw just features four: Bayley, Charlotte, Jax, and Banks.
Paige and Summer Rae are currently recovering from injuries, and there is no timetable for when they are going to return. Outside of injuries, that leaves seven women for Raw to use every week. SmackDown does not have the star power that Raw has, but the blue brand manages to use their women throughout the entire show. Since a two-hour show can do this, why can’t a three-hour show find the time?
Let’s take a look at how Raw and SmackDown used their respective women’s divisions this week. Raw featured two women’s segments, which featured the same stuff we have seen over the past few months. Nia Jax dominated a local wrestler in a squash match, and later on the night, Bayley was being persuaded to relinquish her Raw Women’s Championship.
Nia Jax had an interesting program with Sasha Banks for a few weeks, but now that it’s over, Jax has nothing else to do other than face local wrestlers. Sasha Banks left the feud worse than she went in, but she bounced back after forcing Charlotte to submit to the Bank Statement. Bayley slightly changed things up by becoming the new Raw Women’s Champion, but Charlotte being in the title picture gives this a sense of familiarity that takes away some excitement.
SmackDown, on the other hand, featured their entire women’s division (except Carmella) throughout the entire show. The show opened up with Naomi relinquishing her SmackDown Women’s Championship due to a knee injury, which led to Alexa Bliss and Becky Lynch fighting for the vacated championship. Bliss won the match, and Becky Lynch reignited her feud with Mickie James. Later in the show, Nikki Bella and Natalya assumedly ended their feud in a Falls Count Anywhere match, which Nikki Bella gained a new rival in Maryse.
SmackDown does a great job of using their entire roster, which making every moment the women have on screen feel fresh. There have been several weeks where women would be featured throughout the entire show, from the Lynch/Bliss feud, to Nikki/Natalya, to Carmella gaining credibility by defeating local wrestlers.
On paper, the main difference between Raw and SmackDown’s uses of their women’s division seems to be that SmackDown has three storylines going on at a time, where Raw focuses on one at a time. Injuries cannot be an excuse for Raw’s lack of fresh segments, where they have the same size roster that SmackDown has. What they can do, however, is implement the women they have been leaving on the bench for months, such as Emma, Dana Brooke, and Alicia Fox.
While Dana Brooke is not the most technically gifted in-ring competitor, she would be a fresh face to add to matches, and she needs to move away from interfering in Charlotte’s matches to become her own Superstar. Emma has proven that she is great in the ring, and she is an underrated player in the “Women’s Revolution” by putting on great matches with Paige in NXT. Alicia Fox is a former Divas Champion who has her character down and can go with all of the women that are regularly featured in the ring. Also, she has one of the best Northern Lights Suplexes in the industry.
Along with using the women they already have, Raw would benefit greatly from another draft. If, for example, Charlotte could get traded to SmackDown for Alexa Bliss, it already opens new opportunities for feuds and storylines we haven’t seen before. It helps avoid the issue of shoehorning women into segments that don’t need them just for the purpose of featuring them on that night’s show.
Raw does not have a bad women’s division, but it is not being used to its full potential. While the fans might get tired of the same women on the show all the time, this could be remedied if the powers at be realize the full potential of their entire division. If Raw takes a page of SmackDown’s playbook and plays to everybody’s strengths instead of just featuring their best competitors, they would have an intriguing division that could be featured throughout a full three-hour show.
