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Michael Cole isn’t commentating on tonight’s episode of Monday Night Raw, although it’s not due to illness, a personal emergency, travel issues, or anything else that came up at the last second. Instead, PWTorch has learned it was merely a pre-planned night off. That would hardly be news in most situations, but with WWE announcers, weeks off are rare. Cole recently noted on TV how few nights he’s missed on commentary in his decades of work with WWE.
Kevin Patrick, recently the voice of Raw play-by-play, was back with Wade Barrett on commentary. Patrick was recently moved to Smackdown in a shuffling of the announce teams, with Corey Graves also moving to Smackdown and Cole as the third member of the team. Cole and Barrett were moved to Raw.
Although Cole had planned for this night off going back to very early this year, it’ll be worth tracking if more personnel have weeks off under new ownership. Vince McMahon didn’t overtly prohibit people from taking weeks off, but he set the bar high with his own work ethic of never taking weeks off unless there was a health emergency for decades himself, so the culture of WWE under his ownership led to people feeling it would be held against them if they asked for optional time off.
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I say that the story giving HHH full creative control is pure BS. I saw last night’s RAW and it felt like Vince had written the show from beginning to end. Did any of the faces win a match last night? I didn’t see any. And the usual Bull with Gunther winning for the 8 millionth time, and putting the tag belts back on Balor and Priest after a two week reign by Uso and Cody was totally pathetic.