9 Times WWE Turned Treasure Into TRASH
8. The One Great Nexus Night
There's no one set way to build a star in wrestling, but WWE stumbled upon a potentially great way to magic eight of them out of relative obscurity in 2010.
A disaster of the company's own making, the first season of gameshow-era NXT made fools of the Florida Championship Wrestling graduates to such an extent that even winner Wade Barrett hadn't really managed to escape some form of live arena embarrassment along the way. Looking at how the rest of his year turned out after one incredible night, maybe it was adequate prep after all.
The premise, though rooted in some warped reality, was sound enough. Furious with the very system that had made a mockery of their dreams en route to the main roster, the entire slate of wrestlers pooled their resources to take WWE down from the very top. They targeted John Cena as a statement beatdown, battered everybody that tried to help or even just appeared to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even destroyed the ring and ringside area as if they were to trying to tear down the place that had done the same to them.
The attack was brutal enough that Daniel Bryan temporarily lost his job over it, but seven-strong was still strong enough, and their path of rage led to a SummerSlam showdown with a Cena-led WWE crew. That match is only remembered for two things, and if the most prominent one was how awesome Bret Hart's punches still were, this entry wouldn't be in this list.
Barrett and the boys were so handily beaten in the closing stretch that the whole idea might as well have been flushed there and then. Attempts in the story by The Nexus to force Cena to join the group were scripted and performed with a half-heartedness that bordered on contempt, and perpetually resulted in 'The Champ' looking smarter and tougher than all seven of them combined.
Eventually, Wade was turfed in favour of new leader CM Punk, but the 'New' take on things was a copy of a copy in terms of Punk playing cult leader, and the whole thing permanently hit the skids when 'The Voice Of The Voiceless' decided to drop a Pipe Bomb almost a year to the day after Nexus' original attack.