6 Ups And 3 Downs From WWE Survivor Series WarGames

2. A Banana Peel Champion

Austin Theory WWE Survivor Series WarGames 2022
WWE.com

Reinventing a wrestler to go from being a joke to a champion is a difficult road to navigate, but it certainly can be done.

Having that wrestler win a title by dumb luck or happenstance is probably not the best way to achieve that goal. But that’s what happened to Austin Theory at Survivor Series, as he quite literally fell into the right place at the exact right time to win the United States Championship.

Theory hung in there with Bobby Lashley and champ Seth Rollins, but he was falling victim to Rollins’ superplex/Falcon Arrow combo when Lashley hit a spear on Seth. Both men crumpled to the ground, and Theory fell on top of Rollins, leading to the pin while Lashley recovered briefly from the spear.

Just like that, Austin is your new US champ, not by skill, not even by cunningly stealing the pin. He won by being suplexed and falling on top of another incapacitated wrestler. That is not how you convince fans to take him or his reboot seriously.

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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.