Monday Night Raw preview: Three questions for the May 2 episode featuring the Bloodline and RK-Bro

WWE Monday Night Raw comes live from the historic Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, NC, tonight and we’re just six days away from the Wrestlemania Backlash pay-per-view in Providence, RI.

Whether it’s an extremely important episode or a completely throwaway show that will be forgotten about in two weeks, there’s always questions that surround each edition of Monday Night Raw. I’ll ask some pertaining to tonight’s episode.

Why was the tag team title unification match scrapped at the last minute?

For weeks, we were seemingly primed for a title unification showdown between Smackdown Tag Team Champions The Usos and Raw Tag Team Champions RK-Bro at Wrestlemania Backlash and that has apparently gone out the window. Following last week’s episode of Friday Night Smackdown, the plans were altered as we’ll now get a six-man tag team match featuring the full Bloodline vs. RK-Bro and Drew McIntyre.

So why the sudden change?

Perhaps the company balked at the idea of unifying the tag belts at the last minute and decided against doing the match? Or maybe after weeks of build, they realized they needed unified WWE Universal Champion Roman Reigns on the card to draw more eyeballs. After the proposed Shinsuke Nakamura program was scrapped after just one week, it seemed like the “Tribal Chief” would get this pay-per-view off.

Or maybe this entire complicated ordeal was just a vehicle to get us to the imminent title feud between Reigns and McIntyre? Either way, it’s a jarring change and we’ll see how they shift gears just days before the big show in Providence.

How does the return of Asuka affect the Raw Women’s title picture?

We got the return of Becky Lynch to Raw last week and as expected, she declared her intentions of retrieving her Raw Women’s Championship from Bianca Belair. What wasn’t expected, however, was the return of former champ Asuka, who said she would stop Lynch.

This makes for an interesting summer within the Raw women’s division with Belair, Lynch, and Asuka as the pillars standing atop the division. While possible, I wouldn’t expect to see a Lynch-Asuka match rushed for this Sunday’s PPV. With Hell in a Cell and Money in the Bank fast approaching, however, there’s a number of ways they could go with these three over the next few months. It’ll all begin tonight.

What other matches will be made for Wrestlemania Backlash?

Sunday’s show has the makings of a standard B-level PPV post Wrestlemania with just a few matches with high stakes. We’ll get the anticipated Wrestlemania rematch between Seth Rollins and Cody Rhodes, as well as the rematches of Edge vs AJ Styles and Bobby Lashley vs. Omos.

Other than that, there’s a few possible matchups that could get added to the card. Rhea Ripley and Liv Morgan could have a quickly blowoff to their feud after the former turned on the latter two weeks ago. We could also get United State Champion Austin Theory defending his title against Ali, who made his official return last week. We’ll see how this turns out.