Raw Revelations: Big Ben & New US Champ

Jerry Lawler must have repeated at least a few times "this is a Sportscenter moment" as Raw's guest host Ben Roethlisberger celebrated in the ring with his linesmen and DX doing the crotch chop. Guess what Lawler? Your prayers were answered as Sportscenter decided to cover that on their show. It wasn't ahead of the big Packers vs Vikings Monday Night Football game, but still made the honorable mention. Roethlisberger did a pretty good job hosting the show, and interacting with the WWE talent. He scheduled quite a few matches, including a Diva bowl, the main event with DX & Jericho, and a United States title match. He even played a good role in making it look like Miz was destined to lose and utter the words "I'm awful" into the mic afterwards.

The longer that the Miz vs Kingston title match went on, the more it seemed Miz had a shot at winning it. Miz seems to be an interesting case study, as one week he's going toe-to-toe with John Cena and the next he's losing in quick fashion. WWE did well to make him lose at Hell in a Cell, then make it seem he was going to lose and be forced to say "Because I'm the Miz, and I'm Aw-ful!" However, Miz pulled off a clean win to gain his first United States title reign. This came less than a week or so after his former partner and current IC champ John Morrison said Miz won't ever amount to much or be in the WWE Hall of Fame. Hall of Fame's still early, but it's nice to see Miz rewarded for his work and seemingly drug-free time with WWE so far. If you ever saw him on the Real World, he spoke of becoming a pro wrestler back on the show and even was shown acting as "The Miz" in various episodes of the MTV reality shows. So dreams can come true, for reality stars...

Back to Roethlisberger, he played a good part in the show, with the main event as Jericho and Show were trying to get away from their DX match. Ben and his linesmen made their way onto the ramp to line up and block the exit. Jericho was forced to go back to the ring by DX and ended up losing, right after they neutralized Big Show. Pretty cool match and DX repeated their tactic from Hell in a Cell; play the numbers game by getting rid of one of the tag team opponents. We may see a DX-JeriShow title match at Bragging Rights.

Speaking of Bragging Rights, it's another sort of new concept for WWE PPV's. This one will feature Raw and Smackdown matches (is ECW out of it again?). The winners from all the Raw matches will take on the winners from all the Smackdown matches in a big tag team match for ultimate "bragging rights". The other big stipulation so far, is should Cena lose at the event, he will be forced to leave Raw. He's competing against Randy Orton in a 60 minute anything goes Iron man match for the WWE title. I don't see him losing because he's Raw's bread and butter, not Orton. Of course this will be their last match, and that begs the question who will Cena fight next? It looks like Jack Swagger might get the next big push to become a contender, as he tries to go undefeated the rest of the year.

Hornswoggle seems to be aligning himself with Chavo Guerrero now. Raw has just about run out of father figures for the little guy, because Chavo was on the receiving end of his pranks for weeks. To date, Horney's teamed up with Goldust, Mark Henry, Evan Bourne and Santino Marella. Surprisingly enough, they never team him up with John Cena. Wouldn't that make a more popular tag team with the young fans than DX?

Next week has two beauties hosting Raw with Maria Menounos and Nacny O'Dell of Access Hollywood. Maria is also a correspondent for NBC's Today Show, giving the WWE some more national exposure on morning news. These two ladies will be the first female hosts since Trish Stratus, and probably won't have as big of a role as Stratus did. However, it would be interesting to see them compete in a divas tag match, but I doubt they want to risk injuring themselves or their TV careers...