Y'all better get on the Roman Reigns train right now, wrestling fans, because the WWE isn't going to stop shoving him down your throats until you do. Maybe they'll come up with another 18 nicknames for him that no one ever uses (He's the Juggernaut! The Big Dog! The Powerhouse!) and hope that gets him over.
So yeah, a very frustrating night for those who thought someone would come to their senses and put forth a better direction for the company at the Royal Rumble. The company that "puts smiles on people's faces" ended the evening with everyone booing their chosen one out of the building and even booing a surprise appearance by the Rock. When even the Rock can't make you look like a star, you've done something horribly wrong.
The recap follows:
1. The Ascension beat the New Age Outlaws in the opener with the Fall of Man (legsweep / leg lariat combo) at 5:22 when Konor pinned Billy Gunn. Just a match, as the supposed hot new tag team of the Ascension is already getting hung out to dry by the booking and they look like a couple of indy geeks out of their depth with the big stars. This was set up by a bunch of retired wrestlers beating them up on RAW last week, so you can imagine how much the front office must think of them. Wasn't actively bad at least.
2. The Usos retained the tag team titles over The Miz & Damien Mizdow at 9:23 with a flying splash. We've had roughly 18 Miz v. Uso matches on TV in the past two months and this was one of them. The whole "stunt double" gag is beyond dead at this point and clearly isn't going anywhere, not to mention that it actively hurts the matches when Miz (the heel, mind you) is forced to work the entire match by himself and typically is able to win or come close to it. This was also the case here, as they couldn't ever establish any kind of solid heat on anyone because the whole thing was focused on the wacky antics of Mizdow. Not to mention that the crowd desperately wanted him to tag in and never got it, but that's par for the course with the company that seems to be focused more on trolling their audience than making money. Regardless, a decent match and the second-best of the show.
3. The Bella Twins defeated Paige and Natalya in a total squash at 8:18, stemming from issues on Total Divas or something. A boring match where Paige was never even able to tag in, as Nikki pinned Natalya after a simple forearm shot. Not terrible.
4. Brock Lesnar retained the WWE World title over John Cena and Seth Rollins in a Match of the Year candidate, pinning Rollins after an F5 onto the Money In The Bank briefcase. A spectacular stunt show from Rollins in particular, as he kept up with the bigger stars and showed that he belongs in the main event mix. Brock Lesnar continued to earn his pay, suplexing everything that moved and taking a flying elbow through a table before making the superman comeback and finishing off the challenger. This was a stone cold classic and I was thinking that if the Rumble was any good at all, it would be an easy thumbs up show. How wrong I was.
5. Roman Reigns won the 28th Royal Rumble at 59:48 in one of the biggest trainwrecks in the history of the company. Leading up to the show there was some fear that the traditionally hostile Philly crowd might hijack the show and boo Roman Reigns, but in no way was anyone prepared for how bitter they really were. It didn't help that this match was the perfect storm of trolling the audience, terrible booking, and lack of star power. Daniel Bryan, the clear favorite of the crowd and the audience in general, was eliminated after only a few minutes early in the match, at which point the entire building turned on the match itself and booed everyone involved in it. The theory appeared to be that they would get rid of Bryan early so the crowd could "get it out of their system", but in fact they didn't count on the passion of a crowd that could voice its displeasure for nearly an hour straight. Not to mention that nearly two-thirds of the match consisted of guys laying around on the mat and occasionally choking each other, leading up to grand moments like Big Show & Kane teaming up to dump Dolph Ziggler like a load of garbage while heroic Roman Reigns did nothing. Just terrible on every possible level, setting up nothing good and being mind-numbingly dull in the process.
The immediate aftermath of the show was that the "Cancel" link on the WWE Network page apparently crashed due to server overload, and #CancelWWENetwork shot to the #1 trending spot on Twitter. So WWE has another two months to turn this around and pretend that they planned it all along this way, but I don't like their chances.
