Nikki Bella deserves credit for stepping up her game as an in-ring and overall performer in 2015. She held the Divas Championship for much of the year, and she certainly improved. But she still lagged behind several of the NXT women who were called up and others on the roster (Paige and Natalya come to mind). Being champ is not about being the best overall performer (at least not all the time). But during the course of the year, Nikkis reign became all about reaching 300 days in length, toppling the departed AJ Lees 295-day record. The announcers talked about it incessantly throughout the Divas Revolution of the summer while Nikki hoisted the title up to show it off And she never defended it. Nikki Bella went 72 days without defending her Divas Championship, much of that coming at the height of the so-called Divas Revolution, where these women wrestlers were supposed to be jockeying for position and presumably wanting to be the best also known as the champion. And when Nikki finally put the title on the line, she skated by on a technicality to the record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSzJRZKYx60 But hey, at least that pesky AJ isnt in the record books anymore. Who says WWE is petty?
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.
