Vince Russo’s The Brand Recap – RAW & Smackdown Analysis, Ambrose’s Injury, Rusev Dressed Like Santa, More!

Russo mentions that his criticisms of WWE have nothing to do with him being bitter about WWE refusing to hire him. He says the last thing he wants to do on Christmas Day is leave his wife and his family and go on the road to work for WWE. He still can’t believe that WWE are making talents work a live RAW event on Christmas Day.

He goes on to say that this week’s episode of RAW was just terrible, and they lost him basically right from the first segment. He says that Hideo Itami’s main roster debut fell flat with barely anyone cheering for him, and Finn Balor’s reaction continues to decrease week after week. When Balor first debuted the audience loved him, but now there are only a few ‘cub scouts’ in the front row that cheer for him.

Russo says he hates to see anyone get hurt or lose income, and the only positive to come out of Dean Ambrose’s bicep injury is the fact that we don’t have to see Ambrose/Rollins wrestle Sheamus/Cesaro anymore. Lane mentions that these two teams began wrestling each other on July 31st. Russo says that’s a 5-month program and he still can’t identify what the storyline is.

Russo says he’s probably going to get some heat for this, but he just doesn’t understand what the big deal is about a women’s Royal Rumble match. There are only a limited number of women on each brand and we’ve seen plenty of multi-women tag matches in the past so this isn’t a big deal to him at all. Lane says this announcement was all about Stephanie McMahon hogging the spotlight as usual, and he felt embarrassed for the other women in the ring.

Moving over to Smackdown Live, Russo and Lane agree that nothing really happened on this show either. Russo thinks the only thing of interest that happened on either show was Dolph Ziggler leaving the US Title in the ring on Smackdown Live. Although this was in intriguing segment, he’s sure WWE will find a way to screw this up as well.

Russo assumes that WWE is heading towards Shane McMahon versus Daniel Bryan at WrestleMania, and they will it hype it up as Bryan’s big return to the ring. Unfortunately, he just doesn’t care about this storyline or this angle, and he’s not interested in seeing those two guys compete at WrestleMania.

Russo says there’s no explanation for the way the Riott Squad have been booked since being called up the main roster. They were booked like badasses for 3 weeks, and now they’ve been beat up for 2 weeks in a row. Russo thinks that Triple H chooses who comes up to the main roster from NXT and McMahon goes with Triple H’s decision for a while before making his own decisions.

After a period of time McMahon begins to make his own judgements on these talents, and then he adjusts the plan to his liking. It only took McMahon three weeks to see that the Riott Squad aren’t in the same league as talents like Charlotte and Naomi, and now we’re seeing the results of his discovery play out on Smackdown Live.

Russo understands the need for comedy in wrestling and he actually enjoys it, but you have to use the right people in those spots. He points out that Rusev should never be in a Santa suit like we saw on Smackdown Live last night.

Russo wishes that WWE would have placed some kind of stakes on the main event of last night’s show to make it mean something. There was absolutely no reason to watch this 6-man bout in his opinion, other than to laugh at how silly it looked seeing Jinder Mahal stand next to Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn. Lane says that Owens and Zayn looked like fans standing in the physical presence of Mahal.

That sums up today’s episode of Vince Russo’s The Brand. You can listen to the show yourself anytime here, and I’ll catch ya tomorrow for another recap!