With Royal Rumble Looming, WWE Has Never Seemed Less Ready

Every year, WWE kicks off its Road to WrestleMania—that seasonal burn to the biggest pro-wrestling event in the world—with the Royal Rumble. The Rumble is a 30-man battle royal, with the winner getting a shot at the title at WrestleMania. It starts with one wrestler in the ring; the rest are added, one by one, until there is a ring of sweaty, angry men trying to dump one another over the top rope in order to eliminate their foes. It's not complex, but that's the charm of it.

The format historically allows for a couple things. It allows for an easy plug into whatever feud is currently hot—have the top babyface eliminate all comers for a shot at a heel champion, say, or introduce a heel as dangerous challenger for a crowd favorite. The timing lets WWE pace a storyline with the rhythm laid out ahead of time. Finally, it allows the promotion to spring a surprise if it really wants, elevating a fresh face to the upper echelons of WWE's storylines in one broad stroke. Anyway, it can be all those things.

This year is a bit different, however, for all the wrong reasons. With a roster decimated by injuries—Seth Rollins, John Cena, Randy Orton, Cesaro, and a handful of others are all out of commission—the creative brain trust at WWE decided that this year's Rumble winner would be crowned champion outright, bypassing the title shot storyline that has remained more or less untouched for years.

This coincides with what may be a historical creative nadir for WWE, with the current champion, Roman Reigns, as its alpha and omega. While Cena is almost certainly guaranteed at least one more title to tie or break Ric Flair's record 16 world-title reigns, he's slowly yielding to the twilight years of his career, and WWE has been in an obvious near-panic trying to find a new company standard-bearer. Reigns, a blandly good-looking guy with a familial pedigree in the business—he's the Rock's cousin, if you somehow hadn't heard—was chosen this time last year, and the push hasn't let up since.

The problem is that the fans haven't taken to him that much. This is plain both in his live reaction, which is muted for a top babyface, and in ratings, which are stuck in mediocrity. Vince McMahon, being both stubborn and quite honestly one of the strangest figures in American public life, goes ever harder with Reigns saturation the more it seems to not be working. Stay the course and all that.

So it is that the Rumble revolves, for the second year in a row, around the idea that WWE can just will Reigns into the mold of Cena or Austin. He'll enter first, and he'll be one of the last to leave, if not the last. He'll headline WrestleMania, as either champion or challenger, with mostly retired Triple H as his most likely opponent. He just finished a tepid storyline with Sheamus, another talent of supreme averageness, in which they feuded for the title; Sheamus started a group of non-American wrestlers called The League of Nations, who are mostly together by virtue of McMahon thinking foreigners are united by the strangeness of their un-American status. As that went by the wayside, the McMahon-Austin feud slowly, inevitably returned in the form of McMahon versus Reigns.

None of this works. The fact is that Reigns is just not that good. He's not bad, but he's clearly not the guy the WWE's star-makers want him to be. His promos are mumbled, stilted recitations of lame jokes. His catchphrase—somewhat poignantly, it's "Believe that!"—is awkward. His ringwork, while admittedly good in hardcore gimmick matches, is decidedly average in straight ones, where it mostly consists of a stupid looking "Superman punch" or three before throwing a version of the spear that both Edge and Goldberg made theirs over a decade ago.

More than that, Reigns has exactly none of the rough edges necessary to make the McMahon-Austin redux work—the man was genetically engineered in WWE's developmental territory to their exact specifications. Reigns is what WWE wants all their wrestlers to be: pliable, bland, just good enough to make you doubt that they really do suck and just bad enough that they're replaceable. The refrain from Reigns apologists is always "give him time," to which the reply should be "He's had over a year as the Chosen Guy and he's not gotten any better." It's a decent rebuttal as these sorts of things go. He'll get as much more time as McMahon wants to give him, but how much more could Reigns possibly need?

All of this adds up to the prospect of a predictable Royal Rumble and subsequent WrestleMania, but the dirty secret is that the Rumble is usually predictable. A regular viewer can almost always pin down the winner going in, or at least narrow it down to one of two or three guys. McMahon's almost ironclad guarantee that the face always wins the WrestleMania main event—the heels have only won four of the 31 WrestleMania main events by my count—means that you more or less know the winner ahead of time. WrestleMania season is the most predictable stretch of WWE's calendar year.

It's not really about that, though; it's about the spectacle. Which brings us back to Reigns and the whole god-awful mistake of putting a huge event like the Royal Rumble on his pristine and meticulously oiled shoulders. Everything from now until the end of WrestleMania 32 is about a feel-good moment centered on one man, and the man WWE chose is the wrong one, almost provably so. The smaller stories in each year's Rumble—the surprise returns, the old-timers, and the possibility of WWE's recently poached New Japan Pro Wrestling madmen making their debuts—are usually fun but always secondary to the rhythm of the title chase

One thing that all wrestling fans know going in is that Reigns won't live up to that responsibility. He can't, and it's not even his fault—he lacks the raw talent and charisma that turns a Lex Luger or Diesel into an Austin or Hogan. There's a thing that the legends have that can't be taught, and if this were the type of Rumble we saw in the early 1990s—another fallow period, one that saw Psycho Sid and an aging Sgt. Slaughter main-eventing WrestleManias—then Reigns as a transitional champion would make sense. As it is, the vanilla hero with the fumbling promos is being treated like a once-in-a-generation talent. That's not good for him, WWE, or us. A battle royal is still a battle, but when the outcome is this predictable, it feels like so much less.