10 Epic WWE Championship Reigns That Aren't As Long As You Think
WWE wouldn't lie to you about how long your favourite wrestler was champion for... or would they?
If there’s one thing the WWE does better than anyone else, it’s writing its own history. Whether you believe D-Generation X was actually as influential as the New World Order, or that 93,173 people really attended WrestleMania III is up to you, but one thing that can’t be argued is the length of title reigns. With the exception of some early reigns and those between 2020 and 2021, fans have seen their favourite wrestlers raise all different belts above their heads either in person or on TV.
But how many of those reigns aren’t the length WWE says they are? Sure, there’s been decades of confusion involving back-to-back episodes of Raw being filmed, SmackDown broadcasts jumping to different days of the week, and unprecedented scheduling during the global pandemic, but how has this impacted those that climbed to the top of their division?
For this list, we’re taking a look at title reigns that the WWE likes to adjust the lengths of. With rhyme or reason dictating some, and rewriting the past informing others, these are the times the company decided to the fiddle the figures...
10. Drew McIntyre - WWE Championship - Days: 214. Recognised By WWE: 203.
Poor Drew McIntyre. When he eliminated Brock Lesnar from the Royal Rumble in 2020, the crowd cheered him to victory, knowing a showdown with the Beast Incarnate was waiting in Tampa, Florida.
Everybody knows what happened next…
The world changed; we all spent 18 months at home as the WWE carried on from empty arenas. Perhaps the sparsest of them all was the Performance Centre on March 25, when the Chosen One defeated Lesnar for the WWE Championship he’d been promised more than a decade before.
We’d find out years later in McIntyre’s memoir the exact day WrestleMania 36 was filmed, with the WWE taking 11 days off the Scottish Psychopath’s reign by using the air date of April 5 rather than the taping date of March 25. Across two reigns he’d hold the belt for over 300 days, never once raising the gold in front of a crowd that sorely wanted to cheer the first ever British world champion.