Well, that was typical, wasn’t it? On Sunday, I wrote an entry here wondering out loud “where does WWE go to for WrestleMania”, after Roman Reigns lost yet another title match. Fast forward 24 hours later, and Reigns ended Raw on top of the pile, as the new WWE champion. But the question hasn’t changed…
So, now we have had the “WrestleMania moment” with Reigns, we’re back to square one with the whole “what do they have planned for WrestleMania” scenario. As I wrote on Sunday, WWE’s already blown off the Undertaker/Brock Lesnar story, and now we’ve had Reigns winning the title. Given that WrestleMania tends to end on a feel good moment, what’s the plan?
The early signs point to Triple H vs. Roman Reigns, but that leaves us with either the storyline of Triple H headlining for the title at the biggest WrestleMania in history (that’ll be trademarked eventually, trust me!), or Reigns loses the title beforehand (and possibly a mini-story of him recovering his title, but three title reigns in four months would be overkill).
Kudos to WWE for managing to get the fans to finally behave the way they wanted to, with Reigns finally being rehabbed to the point where he was accepted as a champion by the Philadelphia crowd. However, the journey is only just beginning. I’m not advocating that Reigns needs a long run with the title, but they need to at book him properly as a champion.
None of this “always losing matches but squeaking out as the champion” stuff that they did with Seth Rollins for most of the year, nor do they need to run the John Cena playbook. WWE creative needs to create a new playbook to use for Reigns; one that portrays him as an effective champion, whilst also having a steady output of new credible heels for Reigns to challenge.
In this current era, WWE hasn’t had a good record of doing that, and with the company having five hours of TV every week, not only do you need to have credible heels, but with the rate that WWE goes through storylines, you need to have a steady output of them, otherwise there is the risk of the product becoming either stale, repetitive or mundane. But that’s another commentary for another time.
Lets see where WWE goes with this, but given that Royal Rumble is just over five weeks away, that direction needs to become crystal clear pretty quickly!