10 Things You Totally Forgot About Chris Jericho
9. Daniel Bryan Faced Him In His First Ever WWE Match
Shortly after winning the World Heavyweight Championship in February 2010, Chris Jericho was announced as one of the "pros" on the all-new NXT competition program premiering on SyFy (replacing ECW). If he and Daniel Bryan weren't going to be paired up, then having them square off in Bryan's debut bout for the company was just as good.
Again, Jericho was the World champion at the time and had no business wrestling a competitive contest against a "rookie" like Bryan (even though he had been wrestling for over a decade by that point) from a storyline standpoint. Despite that, he was adamant about getting Bryan over to the best of his ability.
Although their encounter went no more than six or seven minutes, Bryan had a spectacular showing in taking Jericho to his absolute limit and looked tremendous in defeat. The Miz (Bryan's actual "pro") roughed Bryan up afterward, but it didn't by any means lessen what The American Dragon gained that evening.
The only other outing Jericho and Bryan have had since then was on an episode of Raw almost exactly three years later. Jericho has spoke on his podcast in the past about how he wanted to work with Bryan at WrestleMania XXX, but because WWE already had a match in mind for Bryan at the event, Jericho settled for a storyline with Bray Wyatt months later instead.