7 Ups And Downs From WWE Royal Rumble 2015

2. Daniel Bryan Gets Shafted€ Again

At the 2014 Royal Rumble, Daniel Bryan stole the show in an opening match against Bray Wyatt, which Bryan lost. Then the Rumble match rolled around, and fans eagerly waited to see if Bryan €“ the man most maligned by the Authority €“ would enter and win the match to thwart the bosses and headline WrestleMania. He never entered the match, and it took an epic uprising from fans for weeks to propel him into the Mania main event. Sunday night, Bryan entered the Rumble at #10. About 10 minutes later, Wyatt knocked him off the apron and out of the match. This goes back to an earlier point about Randy Orton: If you€™re not going to book a major returning star to win the Rumble, don€™t bother putting him in the match. What makes this advice 10 times worse is that we€™re talking about Daniel Bryan, the most popular wrestler in WWE, and the fact that we all saw what happened last year when Bryan didn€™t even enter the Rumble. This sort of booking just absolutely boggles the mind. God help the poor sap who gets the consolation feud with Bryan going forward. He€™s going to get the wrong kind of crowd heat.
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.