10 Most Absurdly Mismatched Gimmicks In WWE
1. Daniel Bryan Was Not An Underdog
When Bryan Danielson was given the main event in summer 2013, his Daniel Bryan character was presented as an underdog: insecure, worried that he’d been the weak link in his tag team with Kane, and determined to prove himself.
That tag continued into autumn as he faced off with John Cena and Randy Orton for the WWE Championship. However, although WWE loved to tell us how much of a scrappy underdog battler Bryan was, that wasn’t what they showed us.
Daniel Bryan was consistently booked as a badass: a fearless, intense brawler, technical virtuoso and lethal submission expert. He ran gauntlets of far bigger men and emerged victorious. He was handpicked by Cena to face him for the title at SummerSlam in August, and pinned him clean to win the title, going on to do likewise with Orton at Night Of Champions only weeks later.
The fact that both victories were sabotaged by heelish machinations is irrelevant, as is the fact that Danielson clearly wasn’t WWE’s first choice to headline WrestleMania XXX and become WWE Champion proper.
Daniel Bryan was booked to take on the establishment and fight it to a standstill… and he did it like a damned Viking. Underdog? To quote the Bard: that’s no moon. That’s a space station.