How WWE Missed A HUGE Opportunity With The Fiend Bray Wyatt

Randy Orton is the sort of long-tenured character that would fit a match similar to Cena's last year. Loads of them would in fact (Elimination Chamber featured wrestlers with Wikipedia title records longer than Steve Austin and The Rock's combined) but did it really require The Fiend to return to compete for titles like another boring non-monster in 2020?

That match with Cena, especially considering the pandemic, should have been it for Wyatt. Odd vignettes on TV here and there, occasional spooky lights, teases of others who he needs to revist to exorcise the demons of the old gimmick's past. All that sort of thing could have bought time for this Orton feud, or the Braun Strowman one, or even another go around with Roman Reigns.

Instead, he followed up a masterpiece with something approaching the literal opposite. The feud with Braun Strowman was artless garbage, but also driven by Wyatt's desire to reclaim the Universal Championship. The one thing that exposed the character in both victory and defeat was still its modus operandi. This was stupid. Would you want a gaudy belt if you could f*cking float? Or torture people's brains? Who'd give a sh*t, man?

There's an okay core premise at the dead centre of the feud with Randy Orton that has been obscured by lashings of goo and swing-sets and oh so many flames. And that is that Orton's arrogance is pointless when The Fiend is not of this earth. The RKO that flattened Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania 33 can't harm The Fiend, and Orton's going to find out the extent of that when he follows John Cena into his own personal darkness.

When it's all over, Wyatt absolutely cannot follow his own path from a year prior. Leave the belt to the guys in the trunks and stick to the fake sh*t. It's the only way any of this feels remotely real.