12 Ups And 15 Downs For WWE In 2016

3. The Beast’s Wasted Year

Brock Lesnar Goldberg2
WWE.com

You might be shocked to realize that Brock Lesnar actually had 11 WWE matches in 2016. However, only six of them were televised.

But rather than lament the five house show bouts, let’s look at the six PPV matches. Lesnar was tossed from the Royal Rumble by the Wyatt Family – and then there was minimal follow-up, save for a handicap-match victory at Roadblock (in March). Lesnar lost a triple threat #1 contender’s match at Fastlane, beat Dean Ambrose at WrestleMania XXXII and won a gruesome bout against Randy Orton at SummerSlam after he busted the Viper open.

Then there was his 85-second loss to Goldberg at Survivor Series, which clearly is setting up a future encounter at WrestleMania (with a confrontation likely during the 2017 Royal Rumble match).

Basically, Brock’s 2016 was a whole lot of nothing, with some setup for what hopefully will be a bigger and better 2017.

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Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.