5 things we learned from WWE’s ‘Money in the Bank’ 2018

Money in the Bank was a long show this year, but it mostly delivered what it needed to in order to justify that kind of length. Mostly! There were some problems, sure, but they were mostly the kind you can hand wave away to pay attention on the big important stuff and hey guess what I’m going to do since the format of this recap allows me to just skip over the stuff I don’t feel like talking about?

Here are the five things we learned from the 2018 iteration of Money in the Bank, which saw just one title change, but plenty of surprise winners.

Oh, here’s one bonus thing we learned: James Ellsworth is back, and he cost Asuka the SmackDown women’s championship. It was dumb in both a good and a bad way, but can definitely be salvaged easily by letting Asuka murder Ellsworth on live television. And, you know, letting her win the feud in the end. On to the rest!

It’s not that we all believed Rousey was never going to be any good at wrestling. It’s just that her initial on-screen confrontations and promos made it seem as if she had some serious stage fright, and that, in turn, made her seem more timid than she could be with the kind of ring work she was going to need to do. Well, WrestleMania 34 showed us that Rousey was, in fact, a natural, and Sunday’s RAW women’s championship match with Nia Jax showed us that she’s already light years better than she was two months ago, despite not appearing on television in a match since.

Let’s not discount the work of Jax in this match, either: just like Triple H and Stephanie McMahon — two pros with all the motivation in the world to make sure Rousey succeeds — were able to help sell the idea of Rousey as a terrifying badass who can snap you in half in an instant, Jax was able to believably lay on the kind of abuse Rousey has never suffered in a ring or the octagon. Jax is the biggest, strongest opponent Rousey has ever faced, and Ronda didn’t know, at first, how to deal with that: Jax threw Rousey all over the ring, the outside of the ring, and it’s the best Jax has ever looked, too.

That’s even more impressive when you consider that 1. Jax has looked great many times in the past, because she is great and 2. Jax has wrestled the likes of Asuka, Bayley, Charlotte, and more: Rousey, a few months into her pro wrestling career, is the one who got the best match of Jax’s career out of her. That speaks volumes to the ability of both of them.

It’s also wonderful for Jax that she challenged Rousey for this, and then delivered on her promise of beating the absolute hell out of her. If this had just been Jax challenging Rousey and Ronda tearing her arm off in a few minutes, it wouldn’t have had any impact outside of making audiences mad: instead, we got Jax as a believable threat who could, on the right night, take down Ronda Rousey, while Rousey showed she is capable of taking damage and still fighting back to win thanks to her wealth of submissions and strength. Great, great stuff.

Last year’s women’s Money in the Bank ladder match was the first of its kind, and it was good. The women seemed a little tentative and not as brutal as they could or should be in a ladder match, and the ending put a damper on the whole thing, too, since James Ellsworth — a man — pulled the briefcase down for Carmella.

This year’s, though? It ruled so hard, and from the jump had the intensity and brutality that last summer’s event was missing. The men’s match had the bigger spots thanks to the power of Braun Strowman, but the women’s match was better paced, and overall, the more dangerous, edge-of-your-seat affair of the two.

Alexa Bliss was the winner, and while it’s not the most inspired result possible, she is a heel, and heels cashing in is entertaining as hell. Bliss reminded of us as much just about 90 minutes after winning the briefcase with the guaranteed title shot inside by cashing in on Jax after beating Rousey senseless with it. Now, Bliss is RAW women’s champion, Rousey is going to want to kill her, and Jax will be right there with her, extremely same, big mood, etc. etc.

Alexa is great, and her smarts allow her to make up for her relative diminutive size, but she has a bad habit of making more enemies than she can handle. Rousey and Jax alone are a lot to handle, and now Bliss has pissed off the both of them.

Seth Rollins has been on another level for basically all of 2018, so his match against Elias was only a disappointment in the sense that it wasn’t an all-world affair. The match was still real, real good, though, and told a wonderful story that keeps on coming up with Rollins: you’re basically going to have to kill him to take away the Intercontinental Championship, as he’s not letting go of it.

Elias took advantage of Rollins’ bad neck, his surgically repaired knee, and then caused a rib injury by countering a frog splash with his knees. He focused on those body parts again and again, but Rollins refused to be pinned regardless of all of that damage: he got desperate at the end and had a handful of Elias’ tights for the final pin that allowed him to retain, but it’s hard to blame him for that given the abuse he endured.

It’ll give Elias something to latch onto to cause a rematch, and given how this first pay-per-view match went, I’m here for it.

It took months (and months), but AJ Styles and Shinsuke Nakamura finally delivered, from bell to bell, the match we had all been waiting for them to have. The pacing was on point, the violence and aggression escalated throughout, and whenever things slowed down, it was because Nakamura was being an entertaining jerk who was toying with Styles.

We didn’t get one of the wrestlers losing the way we all hoped — by being hit in the beans so hard that they couldn’t get up before the ref counted to 10 — but we got close on a number of occasions, including when Styles decided he had enough of Nakamura’s dick uppercuts and just straight-up punted Nakamura in the groin. He followed that up with a Phenomenal Forearm from the ring to the announce table, breaking both it and Nakamura, and that was the match. Styles retained, and now the question is: what’s next for Nakamura, who failed in his bid to take the WWE Championship from Styles, despite the head games and ball busting?

Braun Strowman was one of eight men in the men’s Money in the Bank ladder match. The seven others all tried to stop him, though, it was mostly six of them, since Miz was smart enough to stay away from the Monster Among Men when he could. Despite a concerted effort to keep Strowman down and out — Samoa Joe, Finn Balor, Kevin Owens, Rusev, Bobby Roode, and Kofi Kingston all took their shots and piled ladders on top of him up the entrance ramp — it just wasn’t possible to keep him down forever.

It didn’t help, too, that Strowman was able to isolate so many of his opponents when he returned from under the ladder pile. He took Kevin Owens out of the match by hurling him from the top of the tallest ladder in the arena, through a table. He broke through a ladder with a shoulder block, knocking down both Balor and Roode. Miz had the same reaction the rest of us did, only with less giggling:

In the end, Strowman won, which is a little weird since he doesn’t need a briefcase: he is a walking, talking, guaranteed shot at the title. However, given Brock Lesnar never shows up on television anymore — he wasn’t at Money in the Bank, defending the universal championship — maybe it’s best if Strowman is the one with a say in when he get to challenge for the championship. Just show up at his house with a ref and a camera, Braun.