10 Burning Questions For WWE Royal Rumble 2017

6. Will Roman KO Owens?

Royal Rumble Guys
WWE.com

This is where we start to get into the gamesmanship of predicting WrestleMania matches.

Who is champion for each brand will help determine who wins the Royal Rumble. So who walks out of the Rumble with the WWE Universal Championship? Kevin Owens’ reign has been a mixed bag: On one hand, WWE elevated a guy most “smart” fans have wanted to see at the top of the mountain, but he’s also been periodically booked as a sniveling heel who relies on his buddy Chris Jericho to win (very different than the guy that obliterated Sami Zayn for the NXT Championship and destroyed John Cena in their initial encounter). If he wins Sunday, he could solidify his standing by being a world champ at Mania.

Roman Reigns, on the other hand, has been more or less waiting since last summer to reclaim a world title after he was basically stripped of it for failing a wellness test. Now that he has lost the United States Championship, the table is set for him to win the Universal title and go on to be booed mercilessly at WrestleMania for the third year in a row.

But maybe, just maybe, WWE will go a different direction with Reigns other than having him in a Mania title match. It all starts with what happens Sunday night.

Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.