There Could Be A Major Flaw In WWE’s Survivor Series Logic

The short road to Survivor Series kicked off with a huge bang when the SmackDown Live roster took Raw “under siege.” Most of the Blue Team’s roster showed up alongside Shane McMahon and they laid waste to the Raw locker room.

While the upcoming November Big Four pay-per-view might be an exciting idea there are a couple holes in their overall plan.

Bryan Alvarez brought up one glaring plot hole to WWE’s strategy on an episode of Wrestling Observer Live. The Raw vs SmackDown feud is getting good and it will hopefully be in full-force in no time. Who knows how this feud will end, but as hard as WWE tries to get people invested in the program leading up to Survivor Series there might be a major flaw to their plan.

“One thing I noticed a problem with this invasion program at the very beginning of the show last night. So on Raw you see all of the Smackdown — well not all of them, most of them; babyfaces and heels alike teaming up to destroy the Raw guys. And of course, everyone starts asking so wait a second, you got Ziggler and Bobby Roode who are feuding and clearly don’t like each other and they’re teaming up to take on the Raw guys? Clearly, this doesn’t make any sense.”

“But if you’re doing an invasion angle,” Alvarez continued as he brought up how fans were perplexed that the SmackDown Live guys appeared to be babyfaces on SmackDown Live and not heels after their nefarious actions the night before. “Because there’s a Raw brand and a SmackDown brand and Vince [McMahon] believes and to a point it is true to a degree because we saw it last night — there are fans of the Blue Brand and there are fans of the Red Brand. And so when Shane McMahon showed up on TV last night sure enough, everyone cheered for Shane McMahon, everybody clapped for him. He talked about how Raw […] they booed the Raw name. That’s the whole idea.”

Alvarez noted how the plan is to keep the two brands separate in this way. Therefore they should be rivals. “The problem with this is to do this right, you also have to have separate announce teams,” he said.

There is a very legit argument to this assessment. With Corey Graves being on both Raw and SmackDown Live that makes it pretty hard for him to play favorites. It’s awesome having Graves on both shows, but his presence can cause some conflict. To make matters even more confusing, he is a heel announcer and heel announcers are usually the ones really igniting the fires of discord into an angle.

“This is now all screwed up because Corey Graves is on both shows and now because Tom Phillips is out of action, he’s ‘on assignment’ [Cole] is now on both shows.” Alvarez continued, “So you should have had an announce team celebrating what they did to this diabolical crew of Raw people who were disrespectful to the Blue Brand exactly like Shane said, but you couldn’t have it because those guys were appalled on Raw and now they’re calling SmackDown.”

If you use the quotes in this article please credit Wrestling Observer Live with a H/T to Still Real To Us for the transcription