10 Times WWE Dropped The Ball With Ryback
4. Losing His First WrestleMania Match
While Ryback not unseating CM Punk as WWE champion was a questionable booking decision, the follow-up was what killed him. He fell short of winning the WWE Championship at Survivor Series, lost to The Shield at TLC, couldn't win the Royal Rumble, and lost again to The Shield at Elimination Chamber.
He seemingly couldn't buy a pay-per-view victory to save his career, but he had one last opportunity to redeem himself at WrestleMania 29 against Mark Henry. The match was built up fairly well as a battle of the behemoths, though they had next to no chemistry when they eventually went one-on-one.
The lackluster match quality would have been worth it had the right superstar gone over, but WWE decided to swerve fans instead by having Henry pick up the victory in the most anticlimactic fashion ever by literally falling on top of Ryback for the win. It wasn't as if Henry was in line for a future title shot (in fact, Ryback contended for the WWE Championship at the following pay-per-view), so it was a baffling outcome. The Big Guy laid out Henry afterward with a Shell Shock for his "WrestleMania moment," but it was too little, too late.