If you can believe it, 2018 is over and another year has gone by, which means its time for us to look back on everything that happened over the past 12 months and assess the damage all around, including in WWE.
My game plan originally was to make a 3-Count list of the top three biggest flops and pops of the year, breaking down the bad and the good and really narrowing it down to a bronze, silver and medal award. Then, I started making a preliminary list of the bad and found myself with far too many options to pick from.
Hence, we’re switching it up a bit, and in the first part of this two-part recap, I want to take a look at what I consider to be the top 10 biggest mistakes, flubs, mess-ups, bad booking decisions and so on that happened in WWE in 2018 (in no particular order).
Let’s just dive in…
Brock Lesnar vs. Roman Reigns vs. Braun Strowman
Goldberg beat Kevin Owens so he could drop the Universal Championship to Brock Lesnar so that he could hold it another entire year and drop it to Roman Reigns at WrestleMania….and he didn’t.
The entirety of 2017 was built around leading up to a match lots of people didn’t want to see and WWE decided to just drag that nonsense out even longer by having Lesnar retain at WrestleMania, then again at Greatest Royal Rumble, and then book the two against each other again at SummerSlam.
After something like their ninth match in this feud that wasn’t good from the start several years ago, Reigns FINALLY won and the title was FINALLY going to be used on Raw on a regular basis, and WWE’s first idea with it was to turn the most over babyface on the brand into a heel, in Braun Strowman.
This killed Strowman’s momentum, rendered his Money in the Bank briefcase pointless, and did him no favors. Then, Lesnar came back just to ruin it all another time, and poof, Reigns is forced to relinquish the title because his leukemia has returned.
WWE’s answer to that was not to correct those mistakes from Strowman, but to go back to the well again with Lesnar, and now, we’re stuck in the midst of another pointless drag of a title reign with Strowman being set up to lose to Lesnar for the second year in a row at Royal Rumble, and for something like the seventh time in general.
This Universal Championship is cursed, particularly when Lesnar is involved and the company’s only goal is that if it can’t be used to push a babyface Reigns, it has to stay on The Beast Incarnate, and it’s amazing to think two full years and three wrestlers were wasted because of that one story’s stubbornness.
Saudi Arabia Controversies
At the beginning of the year, WWE took several events out of the pay-per-view schedule, with the idea in mind being that there was an overabundance of shows and having less of them would make for better storytelling.
Then, they announced the Greatest Royal Rumble, which sounded ridiculous from the start, and immediately drew criticism because of where it was located.
Saudi Arabia doesn’t have the most well-beloved practices and after all of the talk about the Women’s Evolution, going to an area that refused to allow women to participate caught the company some flak, but they went ahead with it.
It was kind of a dud, with a titular match that meant nothing and another stall of the Roman Reigns and Brock Lesnar situation.
Then, the build to Crown Jewel started happening and the murder of Jamal Khashoggi went down, sparking even more controversy.
Long story short, John Cena and Daniel Bryan pulled out of the event, forcing plans to change, and it seems like the original ideas weren’t any good to begin with, as the whole event went down in terrible fashion not only with Shane McMahon winning the World Cup tournament, but Brock Lesnar winning the Universal Championship yet again and Triple H getting injured and the tag team match with DX and The Brothers of Destruction being much worse than it should have been.
This event proved WWE had no good ideas, cared more about the money than anything else, didn’t want to put in the effort to figure out anything better and wanted to stick with their own stubborn plans no matter what.
Of course, they’re doing this all again next year, despite 2018 being an awful disaster for the WWE and Saudi Arabia partnership.
AJ Styles Stuck on a Loop
It should be an impressive feat to hold the WWE Championship for an entire year, but at the end of all this, what good does AJ Styles have to show for it?
His feud with Shinsuke Nakamura was dragged out several matches longer than it should have been, and not even in an impressive fashion to keep the story interesting. They just kept hitting each other in the balls and then Paige or Shane McMahon would announce another match in several weeks.
Then, the Samoa Joe feud was multiple months long and dragged out past its expiration point just because WWE didn’t have anything else in mind.
Then, Daniel Bryan started his feud with Styles, mostly revolving around another low-blow.
Basically, this year, when it came to booking Styles, the creative team had one idea in mind: kick him in the nuts and try to stretch everything as long as possible so we don’t have to think of anything else.
The Raw Tag Team Division
At the start of the year, we had a replacement team as Jason Jordan was not supposed to be the reigning champion alongside Seth Rollins. That spot was meant for Dean Ambrose.
That experiment failed, so they traded the belts to The Bar, who then started to feud with Braun Strowman and dropped the titles to him and….a 10-year-old named Nicholas.
They vacated the titles the next night and the next champions were the fledgling team of Matt Hardy and Bray Wyatt, who failed to really do anything to get the audience to care.
The Deleters of Worlds lost to The B-Team of all people, proving how useless their tag title reign was, as the belts were now on two people with a gimmick surrounding how they’re losers.
They dropped the belts to Drew McIntyre and Dolph Ziggler, who held them just because it was supposed to help further the angle of The Shield against “three guys, doesn’t matter who”
Ambrose and Rollins won, and it seemed like WWE basically came full circle back to this point last year, as immediately, their team dissolved and they’re now feuding, since they had to drop the titles.
By the way, who did they drop them to? AOP, who had been put on hold for months, waiting to get the push clearly intended for them, as they lost their manager and struggled in limbo for a while before being paired up with Drake Maverick.
Drake Maverick Pees Himself
Aaaand then Maverick pissed himself and soon enough, they lost the titles to Bobby Roode and Chad Gable, who don’t have a team name and are just two guys thrown together that WWE had nothing else better to do with.
This was the worst booked championship this entire year and when you consider how bad things have been for the United States title, that’s saying a lot.
And yes, I gave this its own separate category within a category, because it deserves it.
Blowout at Survivor Series
What’s the best way to boost the value of SmackDown Live before it goes over to FOX?
Why, have that roster lose every single match on Survivor Series, of course! That way, everybody who tries to make the argument that it isn’t the B-show has absolutely no foundation anymore, because it’s definitive.
This was made even worse in that somehow, with this terrible game plan in mind, WWE managed to find a way to mess things up even more by having SmackDown win on the pre-show in some kind of confusion.
Then, to make things even worse again, their answer to that solution was to say that it didn’t count!!! Now, not only did it further illustrate how much they purposely wanted to screw over SmackDown by desperately avoiding the truth, it also pointed out how WWE itself doesn’t care about the kickoff show and you shouldn’t, either.
Sasha Banks and Bayley’s Feud
For I don’t know how many months, we were subject to this ridiculous feud between Bayley and Sasha Banks, where they were in the process of no longer being friends because they didn’t trust each other, so they would get angry with each other, flat out fight, still hang around one another, lose more and more matches, get angry with each other, flat out fight, rinse and repeat.
Every time it seemed like the feud was actually going somewhere, it regressed back to the same pattern and never actually accomplished a damn thing.
Now, after all this time, they’ve pretty much abandoned it, but they still throw in some hints now and again that they want to revisit it in the future. What’s really sad is you know WWE will look at that as some “slow burn” feud that fans clearly must have been eagerly awaiting for all these months/years and that they did such an amazing job setting up, rather than the train wreck it actually was.
Bobby Lashley’s Sisters
WWE spent weeks setting up the idea that Braun Strowman needed a tag team partner for WrestleMania and went with a kid for a one night joke before bringing out Bobby Lashley afterward and having him team with Strowman over and over again.
But nobody cared. Lashley wasn’t getting the pops they had expected. So their answer to making fans invested in Lashley was to write a storyline where he was interviewed about his sisters, and Sami Zayn would take issue with that (for some reason) and get some guys to dress in drag to mock the idea.
This was one of the absolute worst storylines and segments of the year in literally every way, from Lashley’s lack of mic skills, the “humor” not being funny, the failure to get Lashley over in the slightest bit and the knowledge that Zayn was better than this.
SmackDown Top 10 List
In February, they introduced the SmackDown Top 10 list, which would revolutionize the way things would be done on “the land of opportunity” to come.
The only thing to come out of it was a storyline where Jinder Mahal was trying to convince Randy Orton that Bobby Roode put a lot of stock in Orton’s placement on the list.
That was a WrestleMania feud. For the United States Championship.
Failure to Launch
When you look back, the majority of the superstars who came up from NXT over the course of this past year were handled pretty poorly.
Asuka came up in 2017 in time to build up to her Royal Rumble win, but WWE screwed that up by having her lose at WrestleMania and then dropping her down several notches for the entire rest of the year all the way up until TLC.
Shinsuke Nakamura had a similar thing going on, coming in 2017, building up momentum to a Royal Rumble win, losing at WrestleMania and then becoming completely irrelevant even as United States champion.
But so many others just either didn’t exist to WWE Creative or were enhancement talent.
The Authors of Pain lost their manager, had nothing to do for months, won the titles out of necessity and then dropped them to a joke of a tag team. No Way Jose wrestled maybe two matches before becoming a jobber who is lucky to appear on Main Event. Ember Moon hasn’t mattered much to Raw. Andrade “Cien” Almas came in with some steam, but was quickly forgotten about. SAnitY has had NOTHING going on and still hasn’t even been able to get Nikki Cross in their ranks. The IIconics were only on one pay-per-view and that’s just because they happen to be Australian.
That is an awful track record for NXT call-ups, which should make us very nervous about how WWE is going to handle EC3, Heavy Machinery, Lars Sullivan, Lacey Evans and the rest.
But hey, they’re promising that changes are coming, so maybe, maybe, 2019 will be a different story. Let’s hope so…
What do you think were the biggest mistakes and worst things to happen from WWE this year? Drop your list in the comments below!
