20 Times WWE Was An Absolute Mess In 2020
RETRIBUTION, Rey Mysterio's eyeball, Rowan's spider, and other stupid ideas from bad WWE creative.
You may consider 2020 to be a bad year for professional wrestling, a disaster, or indeed, an absolute mess, but Vince McMahon almost certainly does not.
The pandemic has been shockingly good for his company's bottom line. Trading the astronomical costs of a weekly road schedule for the stationary ThunderDome will help WWE to record-breaking profits this year, despite the ghoulish assertion that April's needless roster cuts were necessary to keep the group in the red (a claim proven false by Wrestlenomics' Brandon Thurston days later).
The current setup also allows McMahon to do something he has yearned for for years: control the narrative. When every crowd reaction is determined by a button beneath his fingertips, rogue audiences are a thing of the past. In replacing actual human beings with a soundboard, the WWE Chairman has become the dystopian overlord of an increasingly artificial Sports Entertainment world, operating without fear of in-arena backlash.
Fans will return, WWE will hit the road again (albeit on a reduced schedule), and the other parts of the Old Normal will come back as well, but while the average fan may feel deflated by COVID-era wrestling, Vince is too busy Scrooge McDucking.
WWE's financial reports are rock solid. Its product, however? For much of 2020, a shambles.
Let's relive some of the year's biggest disasterpieces...
20. Keith Lee's Fireball Facial
NXT, once promoted as a workrate-centric alternative to Raw and SmackDown's wacky Sports Entertainment trappings, had Scarlett kiss a fireball onto Keith Lee and Karrion Kross' match contract, which then exploded in the NXT Champion's face as he tried to ink his signature.
Kross and Scarlett's presentation has been big, bombastic, and somewhat over the top since they arrived, but turning the duo into supernatural spellcasters? That's WrestleCrap, baby.
And yes, The Undertaker exists. We know this. Stop bringing the legendary 'Deadman's' name up as justification for every bad supernatural angle since his debut.