15 MORE Failed Experiments From WWE Developmental

15. Blue Pants

It was the best of times.

A white hot brand hidden within the walls of a market leader clinging on to hardcores based on little more than habit during a decade-and-a-half of a monopoly, NXT was at long last some WWE-coded product that exhausted WWE fans could actually enjoy. The booking was logical, simultaneously traditional and progressive, and the Full Sail locals gave every act the best possible chance to look and feel like a star. 

Enter Leva "Blue Pants" Bates.

The usual "cult hero" tag doesn't really do justice to just how remarkably over she was, or she was the biggest cult hero in the history of the show. Take your pick but whatever you do, don't sleep on watching her scant moments of magic back. 

She wrestled just 10 times on the show in 2015, introduced as somebody for Carmella to beat with her then-partner Big Cass improvising a Price Is Right song that became her theme, and lost all but one of her matches before the two sides fell out over speculated-upon attitude issues and backstage heat. 

But the deepest of deep connections was best exemplified not by a match but a surprise appearance alongside The Vaudvillains at TakeOver: Brooklyn in August. The biggest crowd in the brand's history up to that point went utterly berserk for her as the counter to Alexa Bliss' interference and had her cameo not been followed by Sahsa Banks and Bayley changing the face of North American women's wrestling forever later on the card, she'd have been the most over female in New York that night.