It’s a very simple thesis. I’ll state it more clearly, though: Roman Reigns needs to pin Brock Lesnar at WWE Fastlane. My feeling is that this is outside the consensus view of what should happen. Hell, even back on Monday Night Raw, Paul Heyman billed betraying Dean Ambrose as the only way that Reigns could advance to the title match at WrestleMania. Certainly given everything that we know about Lesnar both inside the ring and out — he’s a beast, he’s almost unstoppable, he works a limited number of dates, WWE has shown a vested interest in protecting him — it looks like there’s no way that Lesnar should take the fall. In all honestly I’m sure that he won’t. My actual prediction is that Reigns will pin Ambrose and go on to face Triple H at Mania.
Lemme expand on why this is not the greatest idea. Right now, WrestleMania is a done deal for all intents and purposes. Yeah, we’ve got a while to go until we actually get there but the interest level in the show is set. At most WWE is fighting for a handful of viewers still on the fence about actually putting money down or trying to catch it ‘free’ at a friend’s place. WWE is also at a record low in terms of Raw viewership which is reflected across the board. The last real shot they had to draw people back in for Mania was around the Royal Rumble and they’ve failed to do that. All that makes me think that the game plan shouldn’t be to try and hype Mania up to the moon cause how far would you really get? Instead what you want to do is start planning for the rest of the year.
I’m going to take it as a given that Reigns walks away from WrestleMania with the WWE World Heavyweight Championship. Even given Reigns’s not-overwhelming popularity with the crowds I don’t see any other satisfying finish to this story. I like Ambrose better and I think the crowd does as well but he’s been an also-ran in the storyline up until this point. For the same reason I don’t see Lesnar heading on either, plus we’ve already run the Lesnar as absentee champ thing. With all that in mind we want to gear things up for what a Reigns title run will include.
The Fastlane Match
The reason that Reigns has got to pin Lesnar is deceptively simple. Dean Ambrose, for all his popularity and presence, is nowhere near bulletproof. To get a really big deal main event from Ambrose would take some doing as things stand now. I don’t mean talent wise, he can definitely go. I mean as far as his importance to the show he’s not at the top yet. He needs some protection in order for a Reigns/Ambrose PPV title match (which is more than likely to happen) to catch more attention than ‘the friends are finally fighting’. Lesnar is bulletproof. I don’t mean that his reputation would never get tarnished but in most cases he can eat a loss, then just destroy some people and it’s like it never happened. Add on the fact that it’s in a triple threat match and that’s more fuel to the fire. Meanwhile, Ambrose would have a clear claim to being the rightful #1 contender because he wouldn’t have been pinned at Fastlane. By having Reigns pin Lesnar you’re getting two legitimate must-happen title matches: he has to defend it against Dean Ambrose and he still has the challenge ahead of him of trying to defeat Brock Lesnar one-on-one. If Reigns pins Ambrose, you eliminate that possibility and leave only the Lesnar match.
Having strong, clear-cut contenders in place for Reigns is important because that’s how interest is built for matches. WWE seems to build their main events one month at a time, picking the newest contender from the pool and pushing them hard until being vanquished. Problem with that approach is that no anticipation ever gets built up. Yes, we might get attached to stars like Dean Ambrose or Kevin Owens who are clearly not ‘the guy’ yet, but there’s never any sense of ‘when is he gonna get his shot, when is this gonna develop’? Using the Fastlane match as a springboard you can start to build anticipation for these two guys that Reigns is going to run into eventually. Both of these would be gripping not just in the ring but, done properly, in the storyline lead-up as well.
But this finish wouldn’t build up heat for WrestleMania. Like I said, at this point, I don’t really think that’s possible in the large sense. But in the small there is a ‘trick’, a device that would at least interest me. Because over and above everything else, and interestingly making a parallel with TNA, the one glaring problem with WWE right now is its champion: Triple H.
Up for Grabs
When I say Triple H is a problem I don’t mean that right now he’s a problem. I’m not the biggest fan of him holding the belt but I think if there is a purpose he serves having matches, it’s as the nefarious Vince Jr 2.0 who will get into the ring when necessary to defend his investment. The Rumble match was just about the perfect way for such a character to steal the belt. All that has been done fine. The problem I’m having is the idea, even the faintest hint, of Triple H being a long-term champion or even returning to active ring duty. Like Matt Hardy, his time is done. It’s a different generation. If he wanted to wrestle low cards that’d be one thing but there’s no doubt that if Triple H was going to be active again he’d be playing in the main events. Hell, he’s basically just inserted himself into the WrestleMania main. What worries me is the idea of Triple H hovering over the scene ready to take over whenever he feels like.
And the thing is that even if Roman Reigns defeats Triple H, that specter doesn’t go away. HHH still has a rematch clause. He’s still gotten into the ring with the young guys and shown that he hasn’t totally lost it. What’s to stop him from returning, again and again, to foul up any emerging new scene of top WWE stars? In my opinion WWE has been stagnating because of an over-reliance on older stars, and more specifically their resistance to allowing new stars to reach top spots. Even Seth Rollins basically got dragged through the mud behind an Authority truck for six months before finally getting injured. If they want to help build up the audience for the rest of the year, dispelling that specter of Triple H As Champion is an important step.
So how to do it? And wasn’t this supposed to raise interest?
While WWE has time left I think they should put their time into one strategy: chickenshit Triple H.
Not in the full-on sense, he doesn’t need to be running away from loud noises. There’s not a lot of time to develop that, anyway. But he definitely should be making it very, very clear that he has no intentions to keep the title. The angle I would go with is that Triple H is pretty confident he’d beat Reigns, like 95% confident, but he doesn’t want to take any chances. Why keep the title off of Reigns? Not a marketable champion, not ‘the guy’, whatever. The point is that, like all the rest of the storyline has gone, Triple H is going to pull out all the stops in order to prevent Reigns from holding the WWE World Heavyweight Championship for any length of time.
I really would have loved to see more of that play into the build for this Fastlane match. Triple H could have negotiated with Paul Heyman, say if Lesnar beat Reigns at Fastlane he’d just award the title to Lesnar then and there. That horse has gone, though. But Triple H and Stephanie can still cut all kinds of deals. Desperate deals. Big bounties paid to the League of Nations for running more hits on Reigns. Handicap matches. Whatever HHH can throw at him to wear him down for WrestleMania. The Authority could start buddying up to Ambrose, especially if he doesn’t get pinned at Fastlane, promising that they’ll be backing him for a title shot and all he has to do is… move away from Roman Reigns. Not betray him, just not support him. Planting the seeds for the future. Triple H might make other arrangements to drop off the title, even fielding bids.
Like I said, the whole point is to sell the idea that no matter what happens, Triple H is not going to keep hold of the title after WrestleMania. The first thing that does is relieve us (well, mostly me) of the dreaded idea of HHH having a long title reign in 2016. The second thing it does is allow us to believe that HHH might actually win. As it stands now, the chances of Triple H leaving WrestleMania with the belt — no matter which of the three ends up winning at Fastlane — are vanishingly small to anybody who pays attention. Yeah, even if storyline-wise we (I) might fear his continued presence, in actuality he really hasn’t set himself up for that right now. He’s not in the kind of position where we’d expect it. It’s just a bit far-fetched. However if he will potentially dump the title off well then maybe there are some shenanigans that’ll rob Reigns of the title yet again, right?
Well, no. I can’t see anything but ‘Reigns wins the title at Mania’ happening. But the idea is to get us to suspend disbelief. At Fastlane, at least, you can avoid doing the obvious thing and perhaps raise more interest for the future.
