WWE Monday Night Raw 1/2/2012 - The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

He's not exactly my favorite wrestler, but I like that Zack Ryder is getting his moment in the spotlight - the guy worked hard for it and there's definitely something to be said for the way he's marshaled social media to his advantage. I question, however, the wisdom of having that guy continue to be a face, largely because I find him so damn unlikable.

Way back in the old days, the bad old days, the all or nothing days of WWE's relaunched ECW, Ryder got all kinds of heat as a Jersey Shore-esque egomaniac, which is, of course, kind of exactly what his character is. Now, with nothing really having changed (aside from all that Sun-In somebody put in his hair), Ryder is supposed to be a face and I don't buy it. The party-boy lingo, the shameless hitting on Divas, the arrogant grins - all of it would work roughly 1,000% better if Ryder were still a heel. Keep pushing the guy, but let the kids hate him and the smarks love him - make him the Bizarro John Cena.

While I question the wisdom of putting it halfway through the show, instead of swapping places with the extraneous Six-Man Tag that acted as the night's main event, you can't take anything away from another solid performance from Dolph Ziggler and WWE Champion CM Punk. I'm not sure if I dig it as much as some of their earlier match-ups, but it's clear that these guys are learning how best to work with one another, with Ziggler even getting to show off some of his amateur wrestling background. By the time the Royal Rumble rolls around, expect these guys to put on a tremendous show.

Part of why Punk and Ziggler work so well together is that neither one of them is an especially big guy (as far as wrestlers go). Normally, when they face opponents much larger than them, since they aren't high-flyers or top-rope guys really, it's a struggle for both Punk and Ziggler to figure out their offense. When they face someone of a similar size, however, it opens up all sorts of fun possibilities, like the backbreaker Punk hit Ziggler with mid-match. Best of all, however, the finish kept everyone looking strong, a pretty remarkable feat given that it wasn't very long ago that Ziggler was losing a secondary title to Zack Ryder.

Last week I was kind of waffling on the John Laurinatis issue, unable to figure out whether that guy was bad-bad or good-bad, but this week I've finally come around to an opinion that I will continue to hold for at least the next seven days: He's awesome-bad. Now, I'm not exactly sure whether any of this is a result of a conscious decision by Johnny Ace, but I'm absolutely in love with his arrogant, inept authority figure gimmick.

Sure, he's a bad guy, but I'm not sure if he sees himself that way or even realizes that he's behaving in a way that people might not appreciate. It could very well just be because Laurinaitis is lousy on the microphone and has no idea what he's doing, giving the illusion of a bumbling boss, or it could be the finest wrestling-related performance we've seen in recent years. Either way, I dig it, and can't wait to see CM Punk make good on his promise to "Beat [him] like a bitch," which I assume means on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.

This week's obligatory Divas match was an absolute black hole, devoid of anything that might even be remotely interesting to watch. Kelly Kelly is absolutely horrible at wrestling - I can't even make a joke about how little she understands what she's doing in the ring at any given time. Meanwhile, Eve clearly works really hard at learning submissions from the Gracie she brags about sleeping with and figuring out how to do moonsaults, but all of it looks absolutely terrible, right down to the booty pop that looks like she learned it from a text-only how-to on German Wikipedia.

How bad are Kelly and Eve? So bad that they made their opponents, the Bella Twins, look halfway decent by comparison.