5 Times WWE Tried To Revive The Legion Of Doom
2. The Ascension
The Ascension never stood a chance on the main roster.
Konnor and Viktor held the NXT Tag Team Championships for a whopping 364 days (a record that stands to this day), but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The Ascension’s reign revolved mostly around the duo dismantling nameless local wrestlers in under two minutes, with their first major defence coming against the moonlighting Too Cool a full five months into their reign.
NXT wasn’t exactly flush with tag team talent at that point in time, but things were changing. The Lucha Dragons’ mid-2014 emergence helped usher-in a new era of tag wrestling in WWE Developmental. Konnor and Viktor dropped the straps to Kalisto and Sin Cara that September, and with their reign over, there was nothing left for them to do in NXT.
Despite their obvious in-ring limitations, The Ascension made their way to the main roster in December, bringing their face paint and shoulder pads to Raw in a winning effort against The Miz and Damien Mizdow.
Then, unfortunately, somebody decided it’d be a good idea to have Konnor and Viktor cut a promo ripping into classic teams like Demolition and the Legion of Doom. Neither of them are natural talkers, and having them attack two teams from whom so much of their own act is so obviously derived wasn’t just contrived: it effectively buried The Ascension’s chances of WWE success.
A cringeworthy feud with the New World Order, Acolytes Protection Agency, and New Age Outlaws followed. WWE refused to give The Ascension a chance to succeed on their own, opting instead to directly compare them to teams whose legacies Konnor and Viktor could only dream of aspiring to. Perhaps they were never meant to be anything more than enhancement guys, but it would’ve been nice to see them get a shot.