Every 2017 WWE PPV main event ranked by in-ring value

12. WWE Great Balls of Fire: WWE Universal Championship Match

Brock Lesnar (c) vs. Samoa Joe

Monday Night RAW hosted their own July pay-per-view this year by debuting WWE Great Balls of Fire (I’ve already made way too many jokes about the name of this event so I’ll refrain from doing that again), which is not on the docket for 2018, with the main event of the night being a WWE Universal Championship bout between Brock Lesnar and Samoa Joe.

Much like it was with Braun Strowman a couple of months later, this was a match that I had been looking forward to for quite some time. Samoa Joe has been a monster for years, and to see him finally get a main event in WWE, especially against someone like Lesnar, was really cool to see. Unfortunately, while there were a few more highlights here than the Strowman match, this still didn’t last very long.

The saving grace here was that Samoa Joe didn’t get completely buried. The build to the match had made Joe look very strong and it was actually believable to a point that he could take Lesnar out. We knew that wasn’t going to happen with SummerSlam only six weeks away but there was that small glimmer of hope, especially after the start saw Joe attack Lesnar before the match even started and put him through an announce table on the outside. That was pretty solid.

Brock made it back into the ring and Joe kept up the attack. Outside of the Goldberg monstrosity from last year’s Survivor Series, you don’t see Lesnar on the defensive at the start of most matches but Joe was able to make himself look great in the time that he got on offense. However, Lesnar was able to recover and hit one F5 to pick up the win. Lesnar may have won the match but this actually did do some good for Samoa Joe. He was able to keep the champ reeling and while we all knew he wasn’t going to win the actual match, he came out looking really strong after this one, despite the actual match not even making it to seven minutes.