10 WWE Wrestlers Lost In The Shuffle
Who's Mia Yim? What's Elias even doing? Where's Toni Storm? Why's Ricochet NEVER pushed?!
There could be a lot more than 10, being honest.
It's treading over old ground at this point, but Nick Khan's clarity of speech and thought in a recent round of interviews has formalised what much of the fanbase had already determined - for WWE, content is king.
Vince McMahon never called his output pro wrestling, but what lay at the core of his protestations was that it was. The product he sold was professional wrestling, performed at various points - whether he liked the label or not - by some of the best professional wrestlers in the world. The latter part of that may still be true in 2021, but you'd not know it watching Raw and SmackDown half the time.
WWE's roster is loaded with talent in a way that should theoretically make the quality of work higher than ever, but the creative and structural restraints placed on virtually every performer make for far too many milquetoast and over-familiar matches. The new NXT logo feels like an enormous self-own for that very reason - the splashes of colour stand in direct opposition to the beige big man brawls booked by the new bosses.
There are lots of wrestlers lost in the shuffle as a result. Too many. Here, for now at least, are the 10 most egregious examples...
10. Jeff Hardy
The above image finds Jeff Hardy as the last unnamed loser to hit the ring and help catch 24/7 Champion Reggie as he flew from the ring to the floor. Hardy hits the deck with all the rest, allowing the former Cirque Du Soleil man a chance to escape with the valueless prop for one more week.
That was the sum total of the former WWE Champion's contribution to the September 6th 2021 edition of Monday Night Raw, and while it's perhaps unreasonable to want the 'Charismatic Enigma' to be taking too many big bumps in his advancing years, it's a bizarre use of a company icon. Going 60/40 with Karrion Kross was equally useless for both men/
AEW have the opposite problem with Matt Hardy in that he's seemingly there all the f*cking time and absolutely must feud with midcarders in prominent spots always. It's...nice that both Hardy Boys can still go for the top companies 20+ years after they risked their futures for it. There's got to be an equally nice compromise with how much we get of both brothers, hasn't there?