If you can believe it, 2020 is finally coming to a close. The world may still be in a similar situation despite the calendar switch, but at least the tumultuous 12 months we’ve endured are switching over to 2021 after what feels like a decade.
This year has been an absolute mess in and outside WWE. For World Wrestling Entertainment itself, it’s hard to think of any other time the company’s faced such a perpetual onslaught of hardships that have warped the product more than ever conceivable.
With the end of the year, it’s time to look back and recap both the good and the bad. Since it’s easier to get the bad news out first (and there’s so much more of it) part 1 of the annual recap will be another edition of the Biggest Blunders of the Year.
This means the top mistakes, flubs, mess-ups, bad booking decisions, terrible ideas, awful matches, crappy company strategies, unfortunate circumstances and anything else along those lines.
This list is in no particular order and is quite obviously opinion-based, so I invite everyone to chime in with their own ideas of the worst things from WWE in 2020 in the comments below!
Without further ado and in no particular order, let’s get started…
Honorable Mentions
- Raw Underground never got its footing. This isn’t all their fault, as COVID has prevented them from being able to do some proper crossover between the brands in a safer way. However, maybe if WWE followed protocol better, they’d be able to have people do this and not be too risky. Generally speaking, though, this was a bust. Nothing was ever on the line and no one managed to come out of it looking like a bigger star, as people like Dabba-Kato are just on the sidelines now.
- Rob Gronkowski was a total bust, wasn’t he? Clearly, WWE had plans for him to be more of a presence on a different, more normal type of WrestleMania. That’s not their fault. But how they decided to follow through with him, put the 24/7 title on him and do nothing was just worthless. Then, we see that he didn’t even want to take a fall onto padding, which Vince McMahon had no problem doing. It’s padding. Most of these guys crash through tables at a higher distance with nothing but elbow and knee pads.
- The #SpeakingOut controversies aren’t something I can entirely put on WWE. It’s not as though that was a bad decision they made. These were things the wrestlers did on the indies and such before they were in WWE. Hence, as horrible as these accusations are, this has to go as an honorable mention (by being associated with them) rather than something they’re directly puppeteers of (supposedly).
- Good lord did Mickie James have a rough go. She wasn’t part of the roster for the longest time, just sitting at home waiting to come back from an injury. After months, they finally bring her in, only to have her segment be overshadowed by promoting another segment. She lost that match, followed that up with some other garbage and then got injured again. Now, she’s back on the inactive list without being traded to either brand. That’s horrible. She’s far too good for that.
Black Wednesday
If you’re suffering for revenue, you have to cut costs. That’s understandable. It’s a sad, unfortunate matter of fact when it comes to businesses.
What you don’t do, though, is act like you’re hemorrhaging money and that this is your “break glass in case of an emergency” must-do scenario to keep the company afloat when you’re reporting record revenues for that and the next two quarters.
So many people lost their jobs and shouldn’t have. It makes sense to trim down on the live event house show market, for instance, as you’re simply not doing those anymore. Of course, you could try to move those people into other avenues of the company to help on the workload and give them a paycheck, ideally, but nope, not interested in that, clearly.
Some of the superstars arguably wanted to leave, so it’s okay to let them go. A few of them, naturally, didn’t want to leave WWE, but they considered them the bottom of the barrel who they could cut and not lose much from. I don’t blame WWE for having some people they view in that regard, but I do think it’s rather lame to cut a guy like Mike Chioda, for example, who has been with the company for decades and can still do his job as a referee, since that position didn’t leave.
Greed is gross, which leads me to…
The Surrender of Twitch and Cameo
Again, I understand how WWE as a business can look at a revenue stream and say “Hey, how can we make other people do the work for us and subsidize our income?” It’s just not an ethical thing to do in this circumstance, in my mind.
Assuming there isn’t anything in their contracts that prohibits them from these services, WWE should have to renegotiate everyone’s contracts to put these platforms into their deal in a new fashion. Someone like Big E shouldn’t have to stop doing Cameo just because WWE realized how much money he’s making. He’s doing it on his own time, not WWE’s time. It’s not directly interfering with anything WWE is doing. WWE doesn’t have its own Cameo-like service that he’s trying to circumvent or compete with.
By no means should time working elsewhere off the company clock be used for someone’s downside guarantee. That’s absurd. This should be bonus money. So long as they aren’t using the character names WWE owns the trademark for, WWE shouldn’t be entitled to their money no more than if Kevin Owens decided to mow lawns on the weekends for some extra cash.
At the very most, even though I think it’s still wrong, WWE should only be able to take some of the income they’re making and the rest will be bonus money they earn on top of their downside guarantees, since it’s voluntary for them to take that time to work. Even that is wrong, but it’s at least not as bad as it actually has gotten.
You’re going to tell Paige, who can’t wrestle anymore and has lost her spot on WWE Backstage and has nothing at all she can do in your company, that she can’t even play video games at home and make some money off it with her own name because you somehow own everything about her? That’s disgusting.
RETRIBUTION as a Whole
This group has sucked from the very beginning in nearly every single way.
It’s clear WWE didn’t have a game plan when this all started (and likely still doesn’t). Random people did random things and looked like they were cosplaying as rebels. They ransacked both Raw and SmackDown until WWE decided they were arbitrarily going to follow some rules and stay just on Raw.
Why are they called RETRIBUTION? Because they were “wronged” somehow. Despite the fact they were already notable NXT superstars, they even tried to say they were just signed to contracts. Ridiculous.
The names are insanely stupid. Those masks are dumb. The lack of credibility they have already by having tapped out and lost most of their matches is absurd. This whole thing is just garbage outside of trying to make sense of Mustafa Ali’s hacker gimmick being looped in, which it feels they fell ass backwards into, rather than plotted from the start.
It’s a shame, too. The men and women making up the faction are better than this. But WWE should just give up, disband the faction, and let people like Dominik Dijakovic and Mia Yim just wrestle as themselves.
Nearly Everything about Money in the Bank
That match was horrible. Cinematic matches are almost always too hokey for my tastes and this was the worst of the bunch.
That discount Doink the Clown, for instance, is one of the worst things this year, for sure. Random appearances by John Laurinaitis that don’t have an actual joke other than “Hey, that’s that guy!” aren’t funny, either.
WWE gives it to Otis and you can already roll your eyes. There’s no way they’re going to treat this seriously. But hey, maybe Asuka will serve a great purpose.
Well, Asuka needs to be gifted the Raw Women’s Championship because Becky Lynch is pregnant. Then, rather consistently for the rest of the year, WWE would prove they don’t care about Asuka as they would continuously book other angles (Golden Role Models, Lana’s story with Nia Jax and Shayna Baszler) over Asuka as more important.
Otis, meanwhile, did nothing. He never really tried to cash in the briefcase. Eventually, The Miz just wins it with some help from Tucker and WWE doesn’t even bother to have a match between the two members of Heavy Machinery.
Money in the Bank seems to be something WWE is finding harder and harder not to fuck up each year and it’s crazy, as all you have to do at the very least is give the briefcase to someone, not job them out afterward and wait until it makes sense for them to cash in, then do it. Simple.
Lana’s Love Life with Rusev, Bobby Lashley and Liv Morgan
I bet you forgot they were still doing this whole love affair stuff at the beginning of the year, didn’t you? It’s been a long, long year, but yes, that stuff with Liv Morgan being Lana’s ex lover and such was indeed partially from 2020.
Every single aspect of this was terrible. Everything. There wasn’t one redeeming factor. It didn’t help Lana get any more credibility whatsoever. Bobby Lashley had to kick her to the curb to get his momentum back. Rusev left the company and Liv Morgan had about 4 other start/stop “now I’ve figured out my direction, wait, never mind” moments after that.
Erick Rowan’s Spider
Inside the cage the whole time was a spider. A big, fake spider. Then, it died.
Brilliant. That was your idea of how to get Erick Rowan over. That was the best you could do. A toddler could have written that.
The Plague of Injuries
It’s impossible to remember all the injuries that happened this year at each inopportune moment, but they should all be looped in as one big disappointment. Some of that isn’t WWE’s fault, but some just exploited a problem of not planning ahead.
Chelsea Green’s lack of a direction at the beginning of the year led to months of sitting on the shelf. Then, she makes her SmackDown debut and promptly gets injured again and will be out for months. Womp womp.
Keith Lee drops the NXT Championship to Karrion Kross, who gets injured in that match. They give the belt to Finn Balor as a replacement. During his title defense, he gets injured and so does Kyle O’Reilly. But they set up an idea of a Ridge Holland feud. Nope, Holland gets injured. YIKES that title is feeling cursed.
Then, there’s Edge. He finally comes back after all this time and three matches later, he’s injured again and out until 2021, derailing whatever plans they had in place for him.
Again, these aren’t things WWE had control over, but they’re still some of the worst things that happened this year.
Empty Promises
I understand all too well that WWE was unable to book things properly this year in massive part due to the pandemic getting in the way. I’m more than willing to give them some leeway when it comes to some of the more random ass problems that have popped up at the last minute.
To an extent, I’m even willing to forgive them for booking the same matches 100x over. If that’s all they had to work with, then no wonder we saw The Street Profits vs. Andrade and Angel Garza three times every goddamn week. I still think WWE could have done things better and differently, even despite that, but the point here is that if they were limited beyond normal control, it’s acceptable things aren’t ideal.
What isn’t acceptable to me, though, is flat out lying about it.
WWE and any corporation or person loses so much respect for me if they aren’t being honest. I don’t care how well you package a turd in shiny company speak, you’re still talking about shit. Don’t try to get something over on the general populace for a quick turnaround and hope people forget about it.
I’ve never subscribed to the philosophy that you should ask for forgiveness later and perpetually take risks. Sometimes, that’s the case, but when you’re dealing with fan morale being so low and the core audience not trusting you to deliver, you ABSOLUTELY CANNOT continue to paint yourselves into a corner by promising things YOU KNOW you can’t deliver on.
Case in point, Triple H—who is normally so much more chill and down to earth and honest about these sort of things, rather than just saying what you might want to hear for stockholders—said two things this year that I’m still salty about.
First, when asked about how they’re going about replacing Roman Reigns with Braun Strowman at WrestleMania, he said it would be done in a unique way and that he didn’t want to spoil the surprise. People should see how the movie ends before they judge it.
How did they announce it? They literally just had the commentary team super quickly brush it aside on SmackDown the night before by saying “oh and Strowman is replacing Reigns ANYWAY…” What happened at WrestleMania? Nothing at all unique. Goldberg did his spears, which is all he can do, and took a pin and lost.
Why not just be honest and say “Look, we ran into an issue at the last minute and it sucks, as this wasn’t the original plan. However, even though it’s going to feel a bit rushed, and we’re sorry that we don’t have the time to build to this angle and give it something to make it feel more grandiose, we’re still confident fans are going to find the match itself at WrestleMania interesting and we think you should check it out. You never know how things are going to play out.”
The same thing happened with Rhea Ripley, which deserves it’s own section…
The Degradation of Rhea Ripley
Rhea Ripley kicked so much ass in the fall and winter of 2019. She was instrumental in securing a WarGames victory for her team as well as Survivor Series. In December, she dethroned Shayna Baszler to win the NXT Women’s Championship. All was good in the world.
Somehow, someone decided the next step for her would be to goad Charlotte Flair into challenging her for the NXT Women’s Championship at WrestleMania AND TO LOSE.
That made Ripley seem like an ass. She called out Flair and asked for this match and she tapped the hell out. She wasn’t even cheated out of it with Flair nailing her with an illegal object or holding her tights or anything that would give her an out to say she was screwed. Ripley simply got showed up and put down a peg and they had her crying about it as her sendoff for WrestleMania.
How was this mistake followed up? Flair dropped the title the next event to Io Shirai who pinned Ripley. Once again, Ripley’s taking the fall and Flair is being protected. Why?!
When asked about it, Triple H said it would all make sense in a few months. Those months passed by and they did fuck all with Ripley, having her sit around with nothing to do but kill time, then lose again to Shirai.
On the recent media call promoting TakeOver: WarGames, Triple H was asked what the hell happened with all this. He basically, in so many words and masked with company-speak, said “Yup. That was a mess. None of it panned out the way we wanted to. COVID and other stuff got in the way. We set ourselves up with a problem that we didn’t need to create and we hoped that we would have a grand plan to come back around and make it seem like we had this great idea all along that we could say was a longterm booking strategy, but the truth is, everything got screwed up and now, we’re left without the ability to do that at all. You got me.”
That’s unacceptable. Don’t book a bad situation at all. Especially, don’t book something that seems like it is problematic in the hopes you can rectify the problem when you KNOW you have a track record of not following through with things. Then, especially, on top of that, don’t ignore those warning signs and lessons you clearly haven’t learned and play things even riskier during a pandemic when you’ve already seen that anything can get in the way of your own plans.
WWE needs to plan ahead by actually thinking in advance, and this includes thinking of a Plan B and a Plan C for the major stories. Anything less is incompetence and foolishness, and no matter how you mask it after the fact and tell people that “plans changed” and “oh well, just move on and forgive us and give us the benefit of the doubt that we’ll get it right next time, and if we don’t, you should continue to move on and forgive us indefinitely and act like we have a constant free pass to fuck up” because no one is worthy of never having to suffer the consequences of their mistakes.
Rey Mysterio vs. Seth Rollins
I’ve ragged on this feud so much for so long that I’m sure you’re sick and tired of my complaints.
The short of it is that it went on forever, it was never interesting to begin with, every time they had to do the same beat down segments with this crew (including Humberto Carrillo and Aleister Black) to kill time for another week was lame, every stupid eyeball gag was dumb, Aalyah and the rest of the family are bad actors, the Murphy multi-turn was mishandled, Dominik hasn’t gained much out of this and I hated nearly every minute, yet it dominated so much of the programming this year.
Stay tuned for the flip side of this with the upcoming Greatest Wonders of the Year post coming Thursday morning.
What do you think were the biggest mistakes and worst things to happen from WWE this year? Drop your list in the comments below!
