10 Best WWE Championship Reigns Under 100 Days
Time is not measured by clocks, but by moments.
In the history of the WWE, there have been a total of 133 recognized WWE Championship reigns, ranging in length from mere minutes to more than seven full years. A lot of wrestling fans and historians conflate the length of title reigns with the effectiveness of title reigns. While the two things do relate to one another in a sense, they are not mutually exclusive.
For example, Jinder Mahal held the WWE Championship for 170 days, while Eddie Guerrero held it for 133 days. Though he did hold it longer, no sane wrestling fan could say that Mahal was a better WWE Champion than Guerrero was, as Mahal's run with the title was universally panned by both fans and critics while Guerrero's was lauded for the consistently-great matches and memorable segments that came from it.
Mick Foley once angrily yelled at CM Punk, "you wanna be a statistic, or do you wanna be a legend?" These 10 title runs show us that a short title reign can be just as (if not more) effective than a long one.
10. Buddy Rogers, 1963 (22 Days)
I couldn't possibly exclude the first-ever WWE Champion from this list.
After winning an imaginary wrestling tournament in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the original "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers was crowned as the WWWF's first-ever champion. However, something that WWE often fails to mention is that Rogers' run was awfully short, clocking in at a mere 22 days. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that the 42-year-old Rogers suffered a heart attack not long after winning the title, and promoters Vince McMahon Sr. and Toots Mondt were too concerned with his well-being to allow him to continue wrestling extended matches. The second reason is that Rogers was a heel, and heels were generally not allowed to have lengthy title runs in the territory era - they would only ever win championships so that they could drop them to popular babyface wrestlers a couple weeks later.
As such, Rogers dropped the belt to Bruno Sammartino in a 48-second match at Madison Square Garden in May 1963. Though his reign was short and ended rather anticlimactically, he was the first champion, and no one can take that away from him.