10 Best Brock Lesnar Feuds Since His 2012 Return

This past Sunday at Survivor Series, Brock Lesnar and AJ Styles stole the show in what was unquestionably the best match of the night.

What had initially started out like your typical Lesnar squash match soon developed into an excellent back-and-forth contest in which Styles had Lesnar well-and-truly reeling. Lesnar teased a tap-out when locked in the calf-crusher, before a Styles dive from the top rope was countered into an F5, allowing the former UFC Champion to score the victory.

As good as their meeting was though, it wasn’t necessarily Lesnar’s greatest feud since returning to the fold in 2012.

Unfortunately, their programme had ended up being rather hurriedly assembled. Just 12 days before the pay-per-view, a late change of heart saw Jinder Mahal replaced with Styles, and while that undoubtedly made for a better match, it meant the affair was an awfully brief one.

On the other hand, many of Lesnar’s other rivalries have included some of the most storied clashes of recent years. Considering each of the angles in which Lesnar has been involved since returning to the company, this article ranks his ten most memorable feuds of the past five-and-a-half years or so.

For a one-match feud, Brock Lesnar vs Randy Orton was actually fairly drawn out.

The match was announced on 7 July, with their eventual meeting coming at SummerSlam 2016 on 21 August—a six-and-a-half-week build, the highlight of which was Orton’s one-man invasion of Raw where he gate-crashed a Paul Heyman promo to catch Lesnar unawares with an RKO.

However, the overall programme was let down by the lack of meaning behind it.

In many ways, this had the feeling of an impromptu rivalry thrown together solely to capitalise on the exposure from Lesnar’s brief sojourn back into the world of UFC. For the record, his UFC outing took place on 9 July—precisely two days after his SummerSlam match with Orton had been announced.

Plus, that sojourn resulted in the ignominy of a failed USADA drug test. Not that that prevented WWE from ploughing on with its SummerSlam plans regardless—plans that led to an overzealous Lesnar legitimately busting Orton open and leaving him concussed.

As something of a glorified PR stunt that ultimately ended in controversial circumstances, this one wasn’t quite as fondly remembered as some of Lesnar’s other efforts.