How Good Was Babyface Roman Reigns Actually?

10. Presence/Look/Presentation

Just take a look at Roman and you'll understand the thinking behind WWE’s head office throwing their full weight behind making him the heir to John Cena as the top guy. He’s big, strong, athletic, and women are kicking off their shoes to try to be with him just at the sight of the muscular Adonis.

However, presentation played a large part in why these early years failed to capitalise on Roman's talents. After The Shield split up, Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose got new entrance music, updated their look and ran with personas that expanded on their work in the group. Meanwhile, Reigns kept everything that worked before, and that was to his detriment. Coming in through the crowd clicked for The Shield because they looked and felt like a SWAT team about to indulge in guerrilla warfare; Roman walking through the crowd alone made it look like he hadn’t let go of the past, whilst his compatriots had moved on without him.

Entrance music was also a big problem with this part of Roman’s career. As the 'Tribal Chief', he has music that demands your attention. From its thumping drum intro, it feels godlike and commands spectacle with its grandiose operatic vocals. It suits his aura, with a main piano melody drenched in drama and punctuated by stabs of powerful, distorted guitars. The Shield’s music is so intrinsically linked to their arrival as a team, because they had such a monumental, landscape-altering impact on WWE. Just giving that music to Reigns meant he had to carry the weight of all of that, and it was too much for any one man to carry, let alone a performer still trying to "find his thing".

Roman's look didn’t receive an update either. See him today, kitted out in the freshest shoes from sneaker culture and his logo looking like wrestling’s Jumpman. Keeping the SWAT team look of The Shield felt silly because the whole point of that look was to make it seem like the members of that group were geared for squad combat. One man in protective gear looks scared.

The biggest problem in keeping the look, music, and feel of The Shield is rooted in ethics, too. The stable worked because they looked, felt and were presented as being anti-establishment, but Roman couldn’t have been more anointed by Vince McMahon if he came out doing the 'Billionaire Strut'. His presentation vs. the reality of the situation were completely incongruous with one another, especially for an audience that felt overly cynical towards Roman.

Cody Rhodes is a great babyface, but he embraces the idea of being "QB1". Roman was given that jersey in this era, but his presentation was supposed to make us believe that he wasn't handed that on a silver platter, and it didn't work for him.

None of this is Roman’s fault. He was pushed in ways that his skillset couldn’t handle yet - WWE let Roman down with all this negligence. The thought behind him was “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Audience reaction from the very beginning should've shown this to be deeply flawed logic.

2/10