When Kevin Owens debuted midyear, he took WWE by storm, taunting John Cena and assaulting the 15-time world champ and then beat him in his debut match. It was an impressive resume-builder that left Owens few places to go but down a peg. So when KO lost his next two matches to Cena, fans began declaring that he had been buried. And while WWE certainly missed the opportunity to turn Owens into a major star instantaneously, they have let him remain strong enough the past several months that he is in a good position heading into 2016. Owens won the Intercontinental Championship and held it for a couple months before losing it to another rising star, Dean Ambrose. While that could be seen as another negative, KO closed out the year by demolishing Ambrose (and Neville) and showing a mean streak that ranks up there with the best kind of bad guys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOOi6Dq5Grg Even though Owens did not have the best 2015 he possibly could have had, he probably has been booked the strongest of all the NXT call-ups and is in a position where he could actually be a major player for WWE if the creative team can avoid tripping over itself. Maybe this is an overly optimistic entry, but sometimes you have to be positive when looking to the future.
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.
