Monday Night Raw preview: Three questions for the May 9 episode featuring Roman Reigns and Rhea Ripley

WWE Monday Night Raw comes live from the XL Center in Hartford, CT, tonight and we’re just 24 hours removed 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.

Who will be the next challenger for Roman Reigns?

The Bloodline stood tall in the main event of Backlash last night, topping the team of RK-Bro and Drew McIntyre. With that now in the rearview and Hell in a Cell on the horizon in less than a month, the question now turns to who will next challenge Roman Reigns for his WWE Universal Championship?

The seemingly obvious answer coming out of Backlash is McIntyre, especially since he wasn’t pinned during the match. Since the draft October, the WWE has made every effort to keep McIntyre away from Reigns even though they’re both on Friday Night Smackdown. It’d be easy to finally pit these two against each other at Hell in a Cell but with the September Clash at the Castle ppv in Wales approaching, they may elect to hold off on it until then.

How will Rhea Ripley fit into the Judgement Day stable?

Edge defeated AJ Styles in their Wrestlemania 38 rematch last night but the notable thing coming out of it was Rhea Ripley revealing herself as the newest member of Edge’s Judgement Day stable. It’s been rumored that she’d be joining for the past month so it was nice to see it finally happen.

Now that she’s linked up with Edge and Damian Priest, how will she be used? Will we now see more inter-gender tag matches between them and their opponents? And will this catapult her back up to the Raw Women’s title picture? We’ll see.

Are cash-ins done for Money in the Bank?

Last night, the WWE aired their first commercial for July’s Money in the Bank ppv in Las Vegas featuring Cody Rhodes. Standing in the middle of the host site of Allegiant Stadium, Rhodes did a typical promo for the show but dropped an interesting nugget by mentioning that the Money in the Bank winners will get the chance to main event Wrestlemania.

The entire concept of the Money in the Bank gimmick is that the winners have an entire year to cash-in the briefcase for a title opportunity at literally anytime. So with the new Wrestlemania reward added, does that mean cash-ins are officially done? And what about the Royal Rumble winner whose also guaranteed the main event of Wrestlemania? We’ll see if we get some clarity about this in the coming weeks.