10 Wild Outside Bets To Win WWE Royal Rumble 2021
Who's going to point at the WrestleMania sign? Ricochet? Keith Lee? ...Lana?!
Vince McMahon in all likelihood doesn't have a f*cking clue who is set to point at the WrestleMania sign.
Well, they all point at the sign, of course, being robots and all, but which robot is going to point at the sign when the fireworks go off?
You really get a feel for how f*cked the WWE star-making machine is when researching a list like this, because logging onto the WWE dot com 'Superstars' page makes the process of elimination really rather difficult.
You scroll through and think "Well, hang on, it can't be him, because they buried him. It can't be him either, because he's not over. They gave up on him ages ago, can't be him. He's getting a push of sorts, but it can't be him. The person who gets the shot in December doesn't get it in April. Hmmm. They are all pretty irrelevant, aren't they."
To arrive at the conclusion, you must scan that page and perform an equation of sorts: the wrestler with the least damage sustained to their reputation, factoring out proximity to the current main event scene, will land you somewhere near the answer. There's also the "F*ck these millennials, let's just pay a guy from 20 years ago" factor to consider.
So it's either Big E or Goldberg.
Or...
10. Keith Lee
The life of a WWE critic is exhausting, you know.
When you're in your formative years, and you think "This writing thing is easier than Physics and wrestling is fun, let's maybe do this," you don't expect to reach 35 and have to swim through the soup that is Vince McMahon's brain and work out what the f*ck he's thinking half the the time.
Parsing Keith Lee's WWE journey is excruciating.
He rocks up in NXT having wowed the indie set with his charm and jaw-dropping power game. He refines his act to align with the in-house style - i.e. slows things down and utters his catchphrase mid-match - and he does this so successfully that Vince treats his show-stealing Survivor Series 2019 performance like Stacey Keibler's legs. Belatedly, he is rewarded with a double NXT gold rush and main roster promotion. He beats Randy Orton in six minutes. Randy Orton!
And then every RAW match he works descends into disqualification, people get tired because this always happens, and when Vince realises Keith isn't moving the needle, he decrees that he doesn't know how to work.
Keith Lee has endured a bizarre and palindromic career, so perhaps he'll win the Rumble after a comedic repackage in two weeks.
Probability: 55%