10 REALLY Long WWE Title Reigns That Didn’t Work
1. Jinder Mahal - WWE Champion (170 Days)
Only 170 days, astonishingly.
Jinder Mahal only held the WWE Championship for 170 days in 2017, but that represented exactly 170 days he shouldn't have been in possession of it.
The reasons and ramifications were pored over in such excruciating detail last year that they barely need repeating here, but WWE's transparent (and failed) cash-grabs would have at least had merit had Mahal's matches been any good.
Not only were they not good, they were almost exclusively objectively horrendous. A Shinsuke Nakamura summer series was neither sunk nor supersized by a racist build, his television encounters showed zero improvement in his work despite the low-pressure environment, and the less spewed about his rematches with alleged wrestler's wrestler Randy Orton, the better.
Jinder is, was, and remains a jobber in both practice and execution. His time with the title reflected a dangerous turning point for a belt once considered the preserve of locker room leaders, company figureheads and box office overlords. He was none of those three. He was nothing of anything; just a man with a body and ethnicity type that was in Vince McMahon's wheelhouse long enough to steal focus (and apparently common sense) from The Chairman's ordinarily careful top star selection.