10 Worst TNA Champions Ever
The worst of the worst.
As hard as it is to believe, Total Nonstop Action has been around for almost 14 years. The company that started out as Jeff Jarrett's personal project after WCW closed has undergone many permutations and has experienced many ups and downs.
All said, there have been more downs than ups. Despite having a decent TV time slot for eight years, the company never got close to providing real competition for WWE. Many of the habits (and many of the exact same people) that doomed WCW to failure made TNA a mess, and parent company Panda Energy has lost many millions of dollars over the course of the promotion's history.
This list looks back at some of the low points over the past 14 years - the stars who were given the group's world championship but, for whatever reason, failed miserably. Some never got a proper chance, while others were the wrong people at the wrong time. These are the ten worst TNA Champions ever.
Just a note, before we start: technically, the history of the current TNA World Heavyweight Championship stretches back to 2007, when the belt was established following the removal of the rights to the NWA World Heavyweight Championship from the company. For the purposes of this article, I'm including NWA Champions from 2002 to 2007 so as to cover all of the heavyweight champions in the promotion's history.
10. Rob Van Dam
Rob Van Dam wasn't a terrible TNA Champion, but his title reign was an exemplar of a problem that plagued TNA since its existence - namely, the pushing of former WWE talent at the expense of the company's few homegrown stars. TNA gained a reputation as a home for WWE's castoffs, and decisions like this show it was well-founded.
AJ Styles, the greatest native star in TNA history, was champion when the company made the ill-advised decision to start airing Impact head-to-head with Raw on Monday evenings. Ratings tanked, and though the experiment was brief, TNA made one last-ditch effort to drum up interest before heading back to their own timeslot - a title change on free TV, with no prior buildup. On the March 30, 2010 episode of the show, Rob Van Dam beat Styles for the belt.
The move reeked of desperation, and ultimately did the company more harm than good. Though RVD reigned as champion for nearly five months and defended the title against a host of opponents, his reign was tainted by the EV 2.0 debacle (an ECW reunion in 2010 without any legal rights to the brand's trademarks), and it ended in inauspicious fashion - Van Dam was forced to vacate the championship after being beaten down by Abyss and Fourtune, an angle that was a cover for the fact that RVD was only contracted to work a certain number of dates per year and TNA was burning through them too quickly.