Might as well get the biggest thing out of the way first. AR Fox was set to team up with Swerve Strickland against Darby Allin and Sting at All In. It was the kind of spotlight Fox has never known before, and the kind of spotlight he deserves after years of selfless giving to the wrestling business. Now it’s not happening. And there’s probably a good reason for it, we know that. A travel issue, a family issue, something. This isn’t about assigning blame for Fox missing the show. But it does really, really suck.

What we will assign blame for is the way they wrote Fox off the show, which is one of the stupidest things we’ve seen in wrestling this year, and we watch all three hours of “Raw” every week. What’s more ridiculous — the fact that Strickland kicked Fox out of the Mogul Embassy mere weeks after inducting him because he got pinned in a tag team match, or the fact that Darby Allin and Nick Wayne were immediately prepared to accept Fox back into the fold afterward? Imagine if the Bloodline story was done in three weeks instead of three years; that’s what this was. Now, Strickland is teaming with Christian Cage, presumably because Tony Khan was hoping to distract you from the booking trainwreck unfolding before your eyes with the carrot of “Christian talks about Nick Wayne’s dead dad.” For many of you it worked, and we’re happy for you. For us, it did not. And the funniest part is that at the end of the segment, you had Swerve, Christian, Brian Cage, and Luchasaurus on one side of things, with Allin, Wayne, Fox, and Sting on the other side, so it was totally unclear what the new match actually was, because it easily could have become a six- or eight-man tag based on what was unfolding on camera. They announced it was still a tag team match after the fact. So the segment essentially failed to do the one thing it was intended to do. Great job, everyone.