4 Ups & 4 Downs From WWE Backlash 2025 (Results & Review)

1. Ruining Wrestling

When John Cena started on his path down this heel run, he proclaimed that his goal was to “ruin wrestling.”

He might have said that he was going to accomplish this by retiring with the Undisputed WWE Championship and breaking its lineage, but Cena also must have meant that he was going to ruin wrestling by competing in the worst, more horribly overbooked championship matches seen on North American television in years.

Cena’s title match against Randy Orton wasn’t just bad; it was comically terrible, with a pace that made “methodical” look rushed at times and a ref bump that lasted longer than the Intercontinental Championship match earlier in the night.

The first half of the match leaned heavily on staredowns, stalling, punches, headlocks and sleeper holds. They segued into a blitz of signature moves, followed by Cena and Orton spamming finishers to artificially juice the crowd. Just when it couldn’t get more predictable, we got the referee bump, which inexplicably led to Orton RKO’ing an entire slate of backstage officials, followed by an R-Truth run-in, and Cena delivering a low blow and title shot to pick up the pin (as the ref finally revived to count the fall).

Unless they are trying to produce some kind of performance art with deliberately bad matches as part of Cena’s “ruin wrestling” mantra, this is unsustainable in the long term. Cena’s WrestleMania 41 main event against Cody Rhodes was universally panned, and while the Backlash match against Orton didn’t feature Travis Scott making a five-minute entrance, it still was a similarly overbooked, terrible mess.

No one was expecting a classic match here, but if this is the new normal for these Cena matches, it’s going to be a brutal main event scene in 2025 and a black hole of suck for everyone involved. Something is going to need to change, and fast.