It’s Christmastime and December is winding down, so with the Slammy Awards and the 2015 Smark Out Moment Awards all taking place around now, I’ve been in a recap mindset. As such, I wanted to put something out there that goes with the holiday spirit, so I present to you the final 3-Count of 2015: the WWE Naughty or Nice List of the best heels and faces of the year.
BEST HEELS
Brock Lesnar
To start off 2015, Brock Lesnar was the unbeatable champion who would decimate everyone who stood in his way the couple of times that he’d show up on television. While his appearances were few and far between, every time he would participate in the action, it was evident that he was a complete bastard who cared about nothing but his own domination and his accolades. Selfishness is one of the best aspects of heels and Lesnar couples that with another major aspect: being so damn mean.
His feuds with The Undertaker and Seth Rollins made him look somewhat like a babyface, but that was more by proxy of who he was fighting rather than what he was doing. Let’s not forget how this guy taunts his opponents when he’s demolishing them and how he has no problem letting a scumbag like Paul Heyman gloat for him.
We all love Lesnar, but we’re definitely not supposed to.
Kevin Owens
When talking about Kevin Owens, we can’t ignore the elephant in the room about how meteoric his rise was this year. This guy started 2015 off by turning on his best friend the night he won the championship and putting him out of commission by taking the belt away from him just as soon after. He then managed to go straight into offending the most babyface guy ever to exist in WWE—John Cena—despite not even being a member of that roster, all while holding that same championship that he beat Sami Zayn for.
Owens would get his comeuppance several times, but he keeps coming back with more harsh words to say and more people to beat up. Even in tag team matches this year where he’s paired up with other heels, Owens is booked as a guy that still can’t get along with anybody. There’s no real camaraderie to his teams and they’ve even ended with him getting into arguments with his teammates mid-match.
Few people have the credibility on the mic and in the ring like Kevin Owens does, and it means all that more considering how his debut match (on NXT, mind you) was December 11th. In the span of a year, he’s gone from a fresh new guy in developmental to someone who will likely either wrestle Brock Lesnar or Roman Reigns for the WWE World Heavyweight Championship at WrestleMania—and will be booed in either of those matches.
Seth Rollins
The Authority’s go-to guy was without a doubt the biggest heel in the company this year, holding onto the WWE World Heavyweight Championship like his life depended on it after cashing in his Monday in the Bank briefcase at WrestleMania.
Setting aside our IWC viewpoints and looking at this through a kayfabe lens, this guy ruined the main event of WrestleMania for his own selfish purposes, then proceeded to cheat his way into keeping that gold for the entire rest of the year until he was forced to relinquish it relatively recently.
His smug laugh, his cocky attitude and his insistence that he’s far above everyone else on the roster and the greatest of all time fueled every main event storyline for months, with the babyfaces not needing to do much of the lifting for the feuds at all. He survived matches with Sting, John Cena, Brock Lesnar and more just by the skin of his teeth and was eager to laugh it all off the next night on Raw, touting how amazing he was and never acknowledging just how much help he would receive from his stooges.
2016 may signify a change in character for Seth Rollins where he returns as a babyface, but as far as 2015 is concerned, he was clearly the biggest jerk of them all.
BEST BABYFACES
John Cena
Let’s face it, John Cena is the quintessential babyface, and there’s no way in hell this list wasn’t going to include him. The guy just won an award for being the most charitable man in the company, for God’s sake! How can people compete with that?
Cena’s good-guy attitude and “never give up” behavior is the same thing we’ve seen for years, but its repetitiveness and the lack of originality behind it doesn’t negate its message. In fact, if anything, it adds more credibility to it. Someone who does a good deed once in a blue moon is better than someone who never does it, but neither compare to someone who keeps that going time in and time out.
John Cena’s US Open Challenge was a major aspect of this year’s content, showcasing his fighting spirit and his willingness to not let technicalities get in the way of what’s right. Although WWE is always flexible on the logistics behind it, generally speaking, a champion needs to defend his title every 30 days, but not every show. The nice guy Cena is, he would put the title on the line every week to whomever was game enough to challenge him. Now that’s a good guy.
For those hoping to see a heel turn in 2016, you’re going to be disappointed. John Cena will be coming back just as strong of a babyface as ever, and that will continue for many, many months ahead.
Dean Ambrose
Being a good guy in the world of professional wrestling doesn’t mean that you have to be a good guy all the time, or to everybody. Someone like Dean Ambrose represents a different version of a babyface. He’s someone who acts like a heel, but since he’s doing it to the bad guys, that makes it okay. His actions seem justified in a Hammurabi’s Code type of way, where two wrongs make a right.
This “eye for an eye” mentality is one of the reasons why Dean Ambrose was one of the most cheered people in the company for 2015 despite not accomplishing all that much. Every big match that he would have, he would lose, and save for the recent Intercontinental Championship title win, this became a running theme. Still, instead of growing frustrated with disappointment after disappointment, fans continued to support him every time he would fight fire with fire and screw over a heel in some way.
On top of this, Ambrose showed the most loyalty out of nearly everybody on the roster. While The Wyatt Family were arguing at the beginning of the year and The Authority crumbled a few times, The Lunatic Fringe stood by his buddy Roman Reigns through thick and thin, even when facing each other in the ring.
Roman Reigns
2015 was a struggle for Roman Reigns, but it appears to have worked out okay in the end. At the beginning of the year, yours truly was seemingly one of the only people cheering him on in the crowd at the Royal Rumble and receiving lots of angry glares from people who would have rather seen 29 other people win the match. Quite literally, a storyline developed around this concept of “anybody but you” in regards to Roman receiving support.
At the end of this year, however, things have turned around. The crowd is now embracing him as their top babyface more than ever and this all came about through hard work, dedication, and the right setup. It would have been easy for WWE to just turn him heel and go that route, but persistence paid off.
Now that he’ll be walking into 2016 with the WWE World Heavyweight Championship around his waist and a smile on his face, it will be interesting to see how much more support he can gain from the audience or if this was his peak. One way or another, Roman Reigns was the babyface WWE wanted to make happen in 2015, and they succeeded.
Those are just three of the best heels and babyfaces I could point out, but there were plenty of others that deserve mentioning as well, particularly if we included NXT’s Bayley, Baron Corbin, Finn Balor and more. That being said, who do you think would top this list? Who do you think will end up turning from one side to the other this year? Tell us what you’re thinking in the comments below, and happy holidays, everyone!
