10 Big Questions Ahead Of WWE Royal Rumble 2017
1. Can WWE Send The Fans Home Happy?
As WWE’s first pay-per-view of the year, the Royal Rumble sets the tone for everything that follows. A great Royal Rumble is the perfect way to kickstart the road to WrestleMania with a great deal of momentum and set the year off to a perfect start. A botched Rumble, however, can effectively damn viewers to months of turgid weekly television, and the current trend doesn’t look good.
Nobody wanted Batista to win in 2014, and the same goes for Roman Reigns in 2015. Last year saw Triple H, a part-time authority figure, win the match and condemn the audience to a shoddy WrestleMania 32 main event between himself and Reigns. Each of these results was a complete disaster in their own way, and WWE won’t want to let that happen again.
Fortunately, WWE have done such a good job of booking this year’s Royal Rumble build-up that it’d be hard to replicate such a catastrophe. Reigns isn’t set to be in the match, and while there’s a chance Triple H enters again, he almost certainly won’t win. The Undertaker, Goldberg, and Brock Lesnar comprise this year’s top contenders, and there’d be few complaints from the WWE Universe if any of them won.
Unless WWE spoil everything by making the Rumble winner blatantly obvious on next week’s television, there are few disappointing options among the current participants. It’d take a monumental effort for them to screw it up at this point, but we shouldn’t rule out the possibility: this is WWE, after all...