Loss

Reigns has been booked like crap since. Rusev has been booked even worse. They may know how to handle the initial build, but they sure as hell can't sustain it. Even Brock was fucked around with his first year. I don't even mean the Cena loss, which I absolutely praised back then because it was right decision at the time (Brock walked away from his previous run and Cena was the ace, so they weren't about to put their eggs in the Brock basket again right away because that would've been a bad business decision if he had bailed a second time) - I'm referring more to the baffling Triple H series and WM loss. They know how to sustain it. They don't want to sustain it. They were done with Rusev. They decided to make something out of Brock finally and then followed through with it. I don't believe anything in WWE happens by accident other than fan responses. By that logic, WWE hasn't wanted to sustain anything in the last, what, 10 years? They've sustained Cena, Undertaker, HHH and Orton during that time. I do think some of it is incompetence, and I don't think it's a bunch of WWE management sitting around a table plotting about how to ruin careers. I think it's more that HHH has always been hypercritical of other wrestlers and he's made Vince that way over time as well. So now, they see glaring flaws in just about everyone they have on their roster, and they use that to justify not pushing them. I don't buy into the idea that they don't want new stars like some people do. But I do think that they don't want someone like Cesaro or Dolph Ziggler getting over at a main event level because they've convinced themselves that they are undeserving.

This thread has no purpose except to laugh at ourselves for GWE. It's been a great project, but probably ripe for parody at times too.

Reigns has been booked like crap since. Rusev has been booked even worse. They may know how to handle the initial build, but they sure as hell can't sustain it. Even Brock was fucked around with his first year. I don't even mean the Cena loss, which I absolutely praised back then because it was right decision at the time (Brock walked away from his previous run and Cena was the ace, so they weren't about to put their eggs in the Brock basket again right away because that would've been a bad business decision if he had bailed a second time) - I'm referring more to the baffling Triple H series and WM loss. They know how to sustain it. They don't want to sustain it. They were done with Rusev. They decided to make something out of Brock finally and then followed through with it. I don't believe anything in WWE happens by accident other than fan responses.

As odd as it sounds, I don't think Ric Flair is over enough at this stage in the game to pull that off. He's a relic from a bygone era that most younger fans *only* remember seeing as an old man, not as the actual world champ. People react to him when he comes out with Charlotte, but not much more than they react to someone like Dolph Ziggler.

It really wasn't. I'm thinking of banning GIF/photo replies.

Look at how great of a job they did getting Reigns over while he was in The Shield. Look at how great of a job they've done building up Brock Lesnar. Look at how great of a job they did building Rusev in 2014. This is a company that still knows how to build up stars.

I do think his long-term calling is as a heel given the WWE landscape, but I also think there's a lot of newness that has to wear off before it would work. There is a happy medium between trading wins with Chris Jericho and going over every single top star in the company in a gauntlet match, by the way. Owens is a very good WM opponent for him if that's where they're going, and it would be nice to see them given time to steal the show.

It would be an interesting finish for Undertaker to have victory in hand, only for Vince to do something annoying to make Undertaker voluntarily lose to switch the balance of power in the company as his last act as he fades into the sunset. Not saying I am in love with that idea, but it's an interesting one.

Thanks for the clarification. My main objection to the theory still stands. If Reigns is a pawn in a tug-of-war between Vince/Kevin Dunn and Triple H, then I would expect his misuse to look significantly different than the misuse of most WWE wrestlers. To me, it does not. That is what I am interested in reading. What about this Reigns’ situation leads people to believe that it must be the result of a major power struggle rather than WWE’s usual incompetence? My personal opinion is that people are looking for a colorful explanation as to how WWE so badly mismanaged the push of a wrestler we have been told they want to push. Rather than accepting that it is equals parts the usual incompetent booking combined with Triple H’s usual desire to make himself look good at all costs, this theory has been concocted to explain it. I don’t see how the evidence points to that motive. To me, all the evidence points to is that the WWE has badly mismanaged Reigns and Triple H is doing his usual routine of making another wrestler look bad at his own expense. I am struggling from tying Reigns’ mismanagement into that motive, particularly when this promotion has been known to bungle pushes in similar fashions for less nefarious reasons. I think the key difference between this and usual WWE incompetence is that we don't usually hear that they are trying to push guys and are high on them when they are using them horribly. In most cases, we find out Vince sees nothing in them and they are used in a scatterbrained way. That's the difference between what is happening with Reigns and how someone like Cesaro was used poorly.

I would put odds right around 50-50 that "those around Vince" convince him before Wrestlemania that Reigns is a lost cause even though they've tried so hard to build him up, and that HHH should hold the title until he can drop it to the returning Seth Rollins -- a guy guaranteed to be a massive babyface when he returns that Vince will never completely fall in love with because he's not freakishly huge.

Dylan is much better qualified than I am to speak to the word choice, but I do think the theory is solid.

Probably. All I know there is that Dave said there was a reason HHH wasn't in that opening segment, and that art and life in this storyline are much closer than you would think.

The theory, by the way, isn't that *Vince* is deliberately sabotaging him. Nothing of the sort. It's that there is a power struggle between HHH and Kevin Dunn over the future of the company. HHH only wants his pet projects to get over, and Dunn is doing what he can to take them down a notch on the other side, because HHH and Stephanie have made clear that as soon as they get the chance, Dunn is out the door. The more Dunn can make HHH's ideas and judgment of talent seem questionable to Vince, the longer he can put off that happening. HHH was an advocate for Reigns and had no problem with him as the guy for a long time. Then Vince and Dunn got a little too on board with Reigns as the top guy and he was no longer just seen as HHH's project like The Shield was. HHH only wants guys who are HHH projects through and through getting over at the top level because he's planning on taking over the company one day and the transition may or may not be a peaceful one. The more guys who are around that owe him their success, the less resistance he is likely to face. So by getting rid of guys like Dunn, HHH is ultimately neutralizing Vince the same way chemotherapy often neutralizes a tumor by cutting off its blood supply. Vince may be CEO and Chairman of the Board for the next two decades, but when all of Vince's old cronies have been replaced with HHH cronies, Vince's title is just a vanity one because "his" guys are gone. One day, he'll look up and realize he doesn't run his company anymore, and it will have all happened so incrementally that he didn't even notice it until after the fact. It affects Reigns because HHH puts forth ideas that he absolutely knows will hurt Reigns under the guise of helping him. That's my interpretation of the theory.

I am going to blow up the board and ban everyone.

Because Stephanie was a yucky girl at the height of wrestling fan misogyny.

I can't really vote for someone in their prime right now. Hindsight is 20/20.

Yes he had a match against Kohsaka in May that's a MOTYC too. He sadly started to peak right as RINGS was going to all shoots.

Yamamoto is a great worker and will make my list for sure. I think he was a better opponent for Tamura than Han was. He's not as physically imposing as Tamura or Kohsaka, and I always wondered if that caused some fans to overlook him. I'd have him below Tamura and Han for sure, but I think it's a real toss-up with Kohsaka. Check out all of the matches recommended above, along with the Tamura match from 6/24/99, which in my opinion is the greatest match of the 1990s.

One thing Matt and I talked about is Jericho's tendency to build matches entirely around coming up with brand new counters or reversals into his own signature spots. He's obsessed with it. He doesn't try to go overblown epic like Foley or Shawn most of the time (although he tries here and there), but he seems to think the key to a good match is giving people counters they haven't seen before. That requires a level of athleticism to pull off that I'm not sure Jericho has ever fully had, but more than that, it's a one-note way to build a match.

All the praise of Jericho is deserved. All the criticism of Jericho is deserved.

That was part of Ziggler's gimmick at the time. He actually had merch prepared with all sorts of insider terms that WWE reneged on at the last minute.

The point I lost interest in the guy was the Punk feud of 2012. WHAT ABOUT YOUR SISTER?

What I mean by WWE aiming to recreate Rey is that they seem to think if they can find a masked Mexican twice the size of Rey, he will be twice as big a star. They never understood *why* Rey was over, and only sometimes understood that he was at all.

I wanted to make a post about Jericho because I think he's a total wildcard when it comes to his final placement on this list, perhaps more than anyone. As I mentioned in the jack of all trades vs doing one thing well thread, Jericho could work face or heel in any spot on the card and get over doing it. I think there's something to be said for that, and I'd definitely hear an argument that he's the greatest utility player in WWE history for that reason. He has definite flaws though, most of them magnified by overexposure, related to execution. There are spots like the springboard dropkick and Lionsault that I think most people would love to never have to see again. When I think of Jericho's case, I think of the worker from 2002-2005 or so. His championship run bombed and he was now being pushed more as a strong upper midcarder, and I think these are the years we saw his best work. It's almost like the end of his title run gave him the freedom to deliver good matches without the pressure -- he was no longer over in a way where there was a fan demand for him to reach the top. Unfortunately, I don't see him as a guy who delivered his best matches when it counted the most -- Shawn at WM XIX doesn't really ring as a great match to me, and I'm terrified to rewatch Rock-Jericho at No Mercy '01 after reading Sleaze's review, even though I loved the match in the past. I think more of his tag team with Christian, which produced some excellent TV tag matches against Booker T and Goldust during a time most people were ignoring Raw and raving about Smackdown. I think of his miracle match with Kane on Raw in September 2002. I think of his time as a babyface in 2004 where he had a really strong blowoff cage match with Christian on Raw and was a key guy in a lot of the better Evolution tags. I think of the guy who gave Hogan, Nash, Goldberg and Scott Steiner their best WWE matches in 2002-2003. I watched the 2005 Elimination Chamber from New Years Revolution recently and thought that was a great match, mostly because Jericho carried the action without placing the spotlight on himself. I don't see him in my top 40, but I do see him on my list for sure, and mainly because of the good work he did at times in his WWE run when people were paying less attention to him. It seems like his periods as a "hot" wrestler didn't coincide with his best in-ring periods, which creates a weird paradox. Jericho is nothing if not inconsistent and frustrating, but there's too much good in his career to write him off completely, even if many of us wish he'd just go away now, even though he's still much better in the ring than the staleness of his act would suggest. Within every positive about this guy is an insult. Within every critique is something good. I've managed to confuse myself even more with this post.