10 Things WWE Wants You To Forget About The Bloodline
9. The 2021 Drop-Off
There's a recieved wisdom about The Bloodline that goes something along the lines of "formation in 2020 - tightly plotted three year arc with Jey and Jimmy Uso follows - Roman Reigns beats everybody and carries his cousins to gold too - Sami Zayn and Solo Sikoa involvement marks key second wave - explosions in 2023 and 2024 lead to Usos/Reigns title loss and dissolution of original act - business booms on strength of the above".
That's the long story told short, but it also leaves out some narrative disfunction, several dropped threads, and a not-insignificant period of time where the act was starting to grow a little stale.
By the summer of 2021, The Usos were just fully and blindly behind Roman (more on that later) regardless of his actions, while Reigns himself went on a run of boring "big" match title defences against Edge, John Cena and Brock Lesnar. Missing from that list is a match against Finn Bálor's "Demon" gimmick, complete with a generationally terrible finish that robbed the latter's gimmick of any aura and a long-protected undefeated streak.
WrestleMania 37's thrilling triple threat against Daniel Bryan and Edge (and to Roman's credit, a strong TV follow-up against Bryan and choice Backlash outing opposite Cesaro) felt like the peak, and little about Reigns' consolidation of the top titles at WrestleMania 38 felt as big as it was supposed to.