13 Ups And 23 Downs For WWE In 2020

12. Ricochet’s Wasted Year

Ricochet Retribution
WWE.com

In a similar vein to Aleister Black, Ricochet was another NXT callup in 2019 who felt like he gave WWE a license to print money. But Vince McMahon apparently doesn’t like money unless it’s generated by big, hulking dopes, so he frittered away another talented wrestler in 2020.

Ricochet’s 2020 started out like he was going to go somewhere. He assisted in eliminating Brock Lesnar from the Royal Rumble (via a low blow, which has been whitewashed from the records – it was all Drew McIntyre’s Claymore), and then earned a WWE Championship shot against Brock at Super Showdown (there’s that show again). But what could have put Ricochet on the radar turned out to be nothing more than a squash, as Lesnar annihilated Ricochet in less than 2 minutes.

After WrestleMania 36, Ricochet started tagging with Cedric Alexander, as it looked like WWE was going to use the two high-flyers as an exciting tag team to bolster the division. But the duo would lose a bunch of matches, including to the no-name team of Brendan Vink (who?) & Shane Thorne. They would then join Apollo Crews in a never-ending feud with the Hurt Business.

Just when that ended, Ricochet found himself mired in a new never-ending, go-nowhere feud with Mustafa Ali and RETRIBUTION, which is still going on as 2020 closes. Ricochet is little more than a super-talented warm body filling space on the roster and time on Raw.

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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.