If you can believe it, 2019 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.
With the good comes the bad, and it’s easier to get the bad news out of the way first. As such, part 1 of the annual recap will be the Biggest Blunders of the Year. This means the top mistakes, flubs, mess-ups, bad booking decisions, terrible ideas, awful matches, crappy company strategies or anything else along those lines.
This list is in no particular order and is obviously opinion-based, so I invite everyone to chime in with their own ideas of the worst things from WWE in 2019 in the comments below.
Without further ado and in no particular order, let’s get started…
Honorable Mentions Speed Round
Before getting into the bigger ones that I want to break down in more detail, let’s just toss out a few quick zingers.
- WALTER gets his passport and the United Kingdom Championship stolen.
- Cain Velasquez shows up looking out of shape and injured.
- NXT loses several weeks in the ratings to AEW.
- That Batista promo. Give him what he wants!
- Shorty G….
- Massive problems with WWE 2K20 that has led to their budget getting slashed for next year, which will undoubtedly make 2K21 just as bad, if not worse.
- Eric Bischoff is brought on board, moves, gets a reputation for doing nothing (at least on the internet) and then is fired.
- Raw Reunion sure was a disappointment, wasn’t it?
- Every one of those house show pay-per-views were trash and didn’t help sell the idea of a higher priced tier for the WWE Network.
- Bret Hart was attacked at the WWE Hall of Fame. Don’t forget about that.
- A general lack of creative direction that permeated throughout every aspect of WWE programming this entire year.
Injuries, Legal Problems and Suspensions
As always, WWE had its fair share of problems across these three aspects that hindered the year in some fashion.
Plenty of people were injured at points that completely changed the creative direction—far too many to keep track of, actually. Some of those were bigger deals like Velveteen Dream, Xavier Woods, Ruby Riott or Nia Jax. Others were temporary or didn’t matter too much, like no one really missing Jinder Mahal. More on some of them later in this list.
But you can lump that in with things like Jeff Hardy’s injury which also includes his legal issues. That and the lack of direction for Matt Hardy seems to have killed The Hardy Boyz and the same thing is also happening to The Usos and Naomi. Everyone has just been missing for months and that isn’t good.
Speaking of missing months, we had our first two Wellness Policy violations since October 2016 when the other day, Primo and Robert Roode got popped for something and will sit out for 30 days. Granted, The Colons have sat out this entire year, but that’s beside the point.
Contract Disputes / Losing Superstars
Dean Ambrose, one of WWE’s biggest stars, left at the beginning of this year. All that work building up The Shield and investing in him was gone and it gave AEW a huge player in Jon Moxley.
Goldust left. There goes a future Hall of Famer and someone who could have been an amazing addition to the Performance Center and producer teams.
Tye Dillinger, no more. I know he’s not the biggest deal in the world, but he was another “good hand” and could have done more. It also can’t possibly be easier for Peyton Royce, just as Renee Young has her issues between the company dedication in the household, I’m sure.
Mike and Maria Kanellis have had tons of problems since joining WWE and they want out, too. Luke Harper, Sin Cara, The Ascension, Oney Lorcan, The Revival, Kalisto, Gran Metalik and many more are either gone or clearly want to leave.
None of that is good for WWE. The closest rationalization for a positive is that WWE will save money on paying people, but it doesn’t help the company look good at all.
It seems this might only be the tip of the iceberg and 2020 might be an even rougher year in this regard.
Goldberg vs. Undertaker
For the most part, even though he left much to the imagination, Goldberg’s return and feud with Brock Lesnar went over rather well. Then, he decided to come back again for a match with The Undertaker at Super ShowDown to fulfill a dream match that he and many others had. It seemed like a recipe for success, as The Undertaker could work a different style with Goldberg and they’d be set up rather well for an interesting few minutes.
Well, interesting is certainly what we got, as this was horrendous. Easily one of the worst matches of the year, magnified considerably by the star power involved, this was an embarrassment, to say the least. It was so bad that Goldberg even came back to face Dolph Ziggler to undo some of the damage it had done to his career.
Saudi Arabia Travel Issues
That wasn’t the only bad thing about Saudi Arabia. It seems every time WWE goes over there, the event has something horrible about it. When it came to Crown Jewel, the biggest story of the bunch was the travel problems that upset tons of talent, made WWE look incompetent, could have sparked an international incident and derailed SmackDown and plans for the build to Survivor Series.
Some of what came out of that may be better than what the original plans are. It’s impossible to know. But being stuck in Saudi Arabia was by no means a positive for WWE this year no matter what the end result was. This was a bad situation that could have been catastrophic had a few other things gone wrong.
We’ll likely never know exactly what went down, but we’ll be hearing about this in the same vein as The Plane Ride from Hell and The Montreal Screwjob from now on.
Jordan Myles
Oh boy was it bad when Jordan Myles went from the winner of the NXT Breakout Tournament to someone vehemently calling WWE a racist company and quitting. Your mileage may vary on whether or not you think the t-shirt design was racist, intentional or accidental, and how this whole situation came about. But as long as some people believed it was problematic, that’s all the bad press WWE didn’t need.
Oddly enough, the eccentric nature that Myles has brought to this actually backfired and helped WWE in the long run. There was an air of speculative doubt that maybe WWE wasn’t entirely guilty of negligence and poor taste at first. Then, the more Myles spoke up and acted out, the more WWE seemed innocent. Washing their hands of the whole thing and letting him dig himself a deeper hole has worked wonders recently in making him the villain of this situation, rather than the victim, and WWE lucked out with this one immensely. Hopefully, they’ve learned to put a closer eye on their designs for the future so as to not run into a situation like this again.
The Struggles of Sasha Banks
At the beginning of the year, things seemed great for Bayley and Sasha Banks. The Women’s Tag Team Championship was finally created and they were the first to win that by conquering the Elimination Chamber challenge.
Then, they did nothing and lost the belts at WrestleMania. Banks would take the next bunch of months off, with rumors flying around that the two had thrown temper tantrums backstage and could even leave.
Bayley bounced back rather well. She won Money in the Bank, captured the SmackDown Women’s Championship, lost it again but won it back once more. She even turned heel to help rejuvenate her career.
Banks, on the other hand, hasn’t had as good of a string of luck. When she returned, she was red hot, but failed to beat Becky Lynch for the Raw Women’s Championship twice. In her WWE Network special, she clarified that those missing months had been spent suffering from depression, anxiety and other seriously awful things even outside the WWE Universe bubble.
Sadly, here it is at the end of 2019 and she’s still not done anything all that worthwhile. The highlight of her year was winning those tag titles at the start of 2019 and it has been downhill ever since. Playing backup to Bayley and not being the champion isn’t exactly what you’d call a step up.
Lars Sullivan
Lars Sullivan was meant to come up to the main roster alone. Then, WWE decided to change direction and bring up a few other people with him, but he was still clearly the biggest deal of the bunch.
Lo and behold, his 2019 was spent apologizing for derogatory comments he had said in the past, then getting injured and sitting on the shelf.
He has been an absolute bust in every sense of the word. Nothing at all was able to be gained from the time dedicated to him when he was wrestling and now that he’s been out of action so long, he’s going to basically reset. When he’s ready to get back in the ring, it’ll be like he was never on the roster at all. WWE will have to reintroduce him to fans like going back to square one.
That is, of course, if they even want to keep him around. With the amount of political pressure going around nowadays, it doesn’t help WWE’s public image to have someone with the negativity that surrounds Sullivan’s past be someone they’d push. There’s an argument to how people need to be willing to forgive and let others grow and change for the better, but not everyone is willing to do that, and plenty of people will never think of Sullivan as anything but what he used to be.
The Shane McMahon Storyline
So incredibly much time was spent dedicated to Shane McMahon as the best in the world, teaming with and feuding against The Miz, then working against Roman Reigns and finally, Kevin Owens. For the most part, it was all garbage.
How did WWE take a guy that was welcome back with open arms and pops that rarely ever happen and turn him into someone people booed not because they disliked him as a heel, but didn’t want to watch his segments?
Had this been just a WrestleMania storyline and it ended with The Miz winning there, it wouldn’t have been so egregious a problem. However, it just kept going and getting worse. As it started at around Survivor Series 2018, technically, this was basically an entire year of crap with a payoff of a rushed ladder match that was quickly zoomed past to cram in everything else on the SmackDown on Fox debut.
The Superstar Shake-up / Wild Card Rule / Draft
Last, but not least, is the fiasco that was the brand split. This year, the Superstar Shake-up went from an advertised 2 day event to nearly a month of random crap.
Obviously, WWE didn’t want to take an hour to hammer out the details for a plan for the rosters, so they kept changing things around week by week. It seemed like there was no direction. Then, it was obvious there was no direction.
WWE’s response to this? You’d think it would be “to sit down, figure it out and set everything in motion leading into WrestleMania.” Nope. Instead, it was to introduce The Wild Card Rule that would negate any purpose to the brand split.
The very night it was introduced, the rules were broken. That was a theme of this year, when WWE would say things like that the third hour of Raw would be different, only to drop the concept immediately.
Within no time, 3, no 4, no 5, no “however many we can get away with” amounts of superstars were going between both shows and the ratings weren’t even getting any better.
Finally, WWE decided it had to reel this all in with another draft. Even still, soon after that was the Raw vs. SmackDown vs. NXT invasion angle, allowing people to go between shows. Now that Survivor Series is over, WWE is still dealing with willpower control in this regard as people like Tony Nese, Akira Tozawa, Sami Zayn and more have gone between shows just for the hell of it.
Obviously, WWE does not feel confident in most of its talent to have a truly separate roster split and it shows. There are only a handful of people they feel are worth putting on television to draw any kind of rating and when those wrestlers are used and they are still struggling in the ratings, WWE refuses to look at the bigger picture.
That is perhaps the biggest call for help that proves this was less a year of experimentation for WWE and more of a year of desperately throwing things at a wall and hoping any of it would stick, but not even checking to see if it did.
What do you think were the biggest mistakes and worst things to happen from WWE this year? Drop your list in the comments below!
