10 Things That Made Us Embarrassed To Be Wrestling Fans In 2016

If you’d have said at the start of the year that the WWE World Champion would spend a good chunk of 2016 feuding with a guy who was only brought in for a quick squash loss to Braun Strowman, you’d be branded insane.

James Ellsworth’s WWE story is remarkable. An unheralded indie journeyman with an unflattering look and next to no polish, he inexplicably entered AJ Styles and Dean Ambrose’s World Title storyline in September. Eventually signed to a full-time contract, Ellsworth became Ambrose’s goofy sidekick, and over the space of several weeks, Dean aided the newcomer to three highly contentious wins over the champ.

This is where things started going awry. Ellsworth’s first few appearances were relatively charming, and he was incredibly over, but he jumped the shark as soon as he became a legitimate title contender. Ellsworth turned on Ambrose to cost him the title at TLC, and, buoyed by his own delusion, set himself up for a title match with AJ.

Styles promptly destroyed him, but that’s beside the point. Inserting Ellsworth into the title picture devalued what is supposed to be the biggest prize in the business, and detracted from AJ and Dean’s heated feud as a whole. The New Era’s Colin Delaney has since been slotted into a harmless low-level storyline with Carmella, which is exactly where he should have been all along.