Okay, so the three bad tag team matches don’t even need mentioned.
I will say, regardless of storyline, anything else, the Triple Threat was legit good. All three guys I feel did an amazing job. The interference from J&J seemed a bit annoying/ill placed for a match that was really cooking, but then the double AA spot kinda made it worth the pay off just for the laughs.
The Royal Rumble was plain awful. Even ignoring the ending, the match building up to it was poorly executed and uninteresting. I wouldn’t say Reigns had been hated before this, in fact the super man punch usually got the crowd going even if Reigns himself wasn’t that much over, but I feel like the “WWE Universe” collectively turned on Reigns when they realized “Whoa, this isn’t just the guy who has a few cool spots and was part of the SHIELD, they’re actually going to put this guy who can’t talk on a mic or wrestle a match in the main event of WrestleMania” and got pissed. Hell, that’s how I felt. Oh well, it’s just wrestling, but WWE has done this before. You cannot force a face down people’s throat, Vince can waste his money on this for months but it just won’t work. Even if Reigns improves his mic and ring skills it won’t matter now, because you’ve forced him on the fan base at a skill level simply not justifying it, they will hate Reigns.
John Cena sells millions of dollars and merchandise and brings tons of kids and their parents to all the shows, while he’s not popular on the Internet John Cena isn’t a “manufactured” star, he legit sells huge amounts of tickets and merchandise. But Reigns? He won’t do either. I can guarantee you Roman Reigns t-shirts aren’t going to start selling like hot cakes and people aren’t going to be buying Network subscriptions or going to the shows because of Roman Reigns, simple truth. It’s possible with 3-4 years of seasoning Reigns may have become a legit star, but now that they’ve done this it can never happen for him. Basically we’re seeing Jack Swagger 2.0. A guy the powers that be decide have the “look” and fuck the fans, he’s gonna be “the guy.” But again, you can’t force a face on people. Not when he isn’t moving merchandise and isn’t selling tickets (Cena does both, despite him being booed by half the fans.) Reigns is going to be the next Jack Swagger.
What’s crazy is they’ve almost tainted Rock with this, Rock had/has been almost a god in WWE whenever he’s dropped in, but his association with Reigns has almost done that in now.
Probably the weirdest take away from the night is how little WWE seems to care about the traditional concepts of heels and faces. The only guy they’re getting this right on right now is Seth Rollins, he’s booked as a heel, wrestles as a heel, and largely is reacted to as a heel and acts like a heel.
But then you have Brock Lesnar who is booked as a heel but wrestles as a face. In both Summerslam, Night of Champions, and tonight, he wrestled as a straight face. Actually tonight Cena wrestled as a heel against Brock–he used a weapon on Brock while Brock never broke any of the rules against Cena. Cena even teamed up with Rollins a little bit in the beginning against Brock (another heel thing, typically in a triple threat two heels team up on the face.) Brock also was acting as a face by being put on a stretcher then coming back into the match.
Brock’s reaction has been mixed ever since beating Cena at Summerslam, but I’d say he’s getting a face reaction at least as much as Cena does.
Then we have Roman Reigns, a guy booed from beginning to end of the Royal Rumble now booked in the “face” spot for the Wrestlemania main event. What’s sad is Brock despite negotiating a terrible (for WWE, great for him) contract is still a legit good “professional wrestler” they spent a ton of money on him to wrestle I think four matches with Cena since 2012, one with Undertaker, and now one with Regins. There were a lot of really legitimate, good matches we could’ve seen Brock in during that span but WWE instead misused him heavily.
