10 Biggest Winners Of The 2016 WWE Draft (One Year Later)

7. Kevin Owens

Kevin Owens
WWE.com

It might not seem as though Kevin Owens has had a particularly good time of things over the last year. Owens has been pinned more times than one would like him to have been, and has suffered big losses to Chris Jericho, AJ Styles, Goldberg, and more over that time.

But I implore the naysayers to take a step back and look at the year Kevin Owens has had in a broader light. Owens was the 18th pick of the entire draft, but one month and 10 days later he had jumped to the top of the RAW food chain. On 29 August, Owens defeated Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns, and Big Cass to become just the second ever WWE Universal Champion.

Owens was booked fairly poorly throughout his run, but he still managed to hold onto the belt for 188 days, far longer than anyone else to this day. KO followed that up with a United States Championship victory at WrestleMania 33, becoming the second individual (after Bray Wyatt) to win two different championships in the new draft era.

Owens was subsequently drafted to SmackDown Live, where he has been embroiled in a feud with AJ Styles. AJ may have taken the United States Championship from the Face of America, but Owens is still towards the top of the card. The past 12 months have seen Owens become a vital cog in the WWE machine.

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Contributor
Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.