10 WWE Feuds Doomed From The Start

After spending years of our lives watching professional wrestling, many of us have developed a special ability for sniffing out a WWE disaster long before the alarm is officially raised.

This skill isn't going to win us any Nobel Prizes, but it does mean that - at least some of the time - we can identify, pretty early on, which feuds are heading into the history books à la Stone Cold versus The Rock, and, conversely, which ones are going to crash and burn.

There are several warning signs to which one should pay close attention. If the fans start off booing the "wrong" guy, then you can be pretty sure that things aren't going to end well. Similarly, if there's no crowd reaction at all, it's probably not going to last the course.

In certain instances, you can probably figure out with the sound turned all the way down. You can just tell that the two wrestlers in question are not a good match, or worse still: that they are a good match but the storyline they've been given is crass or nonsensical.

In many cases, the most underwhelming feuds are the ones that a major wrestler contests with a comparative rookie in preparation for their run at a fellow heavy hitter a couple of months down the line. There's just no suspense, no jeopardy.

That's pretty much what happened when Stone Cold and Rikishi tussled in 2000. Everyone knew that Austin had his sights set on The Rock and the WWE Title, but before he could get there, he had to go through The Rock's pesky cousin.

The worst part was that not even Rikishi himself could come up with any sensible reason for mowing the Texas Rattlesnake down at Survivor Series the previous year. He basically told the world he did it to help someone else get over.

Against this backdrop, the feud was only ever going to be a snorefest. Stone Cold's adversary was little more than a placeholder, and one whose character was about as two-dimensional as it was possible to get in the storyline-driven Attitude Era.