10 WWE Champions Who Weren't Ready For The Belt

There is such a thing as a period of adolescence in the career of a grown adult professional wrestler.

Fans, your writer included, are often impatient, demanding a main event run on behalf of a performer in chrysalis.

The famed 'Monster' hype video that preceded Daniel Bryan's improbable WrestleMania XXX triumph put this into glorious focus. Bryan Danielson's cult army of ROH fans, high on his seminal storytelling library and polymath character work, declared him an immediate WWE headliner.

The vignette incorporated footage of Daniel Bryan's early WWE career, and it was striking how young and raw he looked within that context. He hadn't yet adopted the TV tan, nor the distinctive/marketable beard. He hadn't yet broadened his in-ring style to incorporate his spin on the trademark WWE fire-up sequence, one that played to the basic grasp of the all-important children demographic. Bryan entered the WWE system as an A+ pro wrestler, but a B+ sports entertainer. He was ready, by 2013; his immaculate work in the Team Hell No storyline cast him as both immaculate technician and megastar.

The nine month delay was a marriage of pure arrogance and maddening ineptitude, but on past precedent and future performance, it wasn't quite as nonsensical as it appeared on the surface.

Jinder Mahal was less ripen-at-home avocado, more profoundly basic performer who absolutely did not belong anywhere near the once-prestigious WWE Championship.

He was the most ill-equipped performer ever to hold it; dry in physique and in every other criteria, Mahal entered methodical, dull performances in the ring and desperate, quasi-controversial performances on the stick. That wasn't a problem specific to the Maharaja, but he wasn't over. He arrived in the main event suddenly and inexplicably. Transparent, cynical, and destructive to beloved fan concepts like lineage and narrative, Mahal's run introduced an era of tedium and apathy.

And yet, he was the depressingly perfect representative of a new era. He was the face of the company, in a strange and damning way. Those beloved fan concepts are immaterial because WWE is no longer a business driven by fan revenue: Saudi Arabia riyal and billions of TV dollars shape the success of a company micromanaged by a madman stuck in time.

Mahal did not burn down the House That AJ Styles Built; SmackDown attendances continued to stagnate. Those eye-watering pictures of empty hard camera sides still flood SquaredCircle, irrespective of whether an estimated experiment like Mahal, or a G.O.A.T in Best In The World form, like Daniel Bryan, holds the belt.

The brand is creatively bankrupt, but those debts are covered.