10 Early Wrestling Predictions For 2017
She will be loved.
Looking into wrestling's crystal ball is a fool's errand, obscured as it is by politicking, the drastic whims of Vince McMahon, and the lunatic core of the industry as a whole.
Paige, while still under WWE contract, just proposed to Albert El Patron in a Puerto Rican ring at a World Wrestling Council event. The southern, diminutive, TNA-drenched AJ Styles became WWE Champion in September. Shane McMahon fought The Undertaker at WrestleMania 32. Anybody who foresaw these circumstances, even as recently as summer 2015, would have been sectioned.
Predicting something along those lines would see one laughed out of the comments section altogether. Shane McMahon was such a left-field choice of a WrestleMania opponent that perhaps Bruce Prichard's suggestion of Amish Roadkill (!) will be exhumed. Or perhaps even Stephanie - surely, her smarmy comeuppance must come around at some point - will be next to throw herself off the Cell to justify a deathly-dull thirty minute bore.
These predictions are altogether safer - though one in particular is perhaps more unfathomable than the de-chinned James Ellsworth challenging for the WWE Championship...
10. A Women's Match Will Headline A Pay Per View
This is something of a Vince Russo - a no-brainer.
There are so many Pay Per Views in this so-called "New Era" that this prediction is almost an inevitability. Given that WWE insists on giving away matches away for free on TV, eventually, they will run out of hooks.
If nothing else, it will provide them with an opportunity to augment their PR image. They will hype the hell out of it when it happens, and will promote themselves as much as the women who will contest it, positioning themselves at the forefront of the women's rights crusade - despite once awarding the Women's championship to Debra because everybody had already seen Sable's t*ts (literally, that was the storyline reason).
If this is all reading very cynical, then at least the women who do so will have earned the right. Their matches - particularly on the RAW brand - are all too often botched, but you can forgive the over-exuberance. Sasha Banks et al. have been given an unprecedented opportunity to excel, and even if they try too hard on occasion, their matches are often more exciting and literary in scope than their male counterparts.
Banks Vs. Bayley at a post-'Mania RAW brand PPV is a PR dream in waiting - a way of recapturing some mainstream buzz before SummerSlam.