Ranking EVERY WWE Champion From Worst To Best
45. Dean Ambrose
In All Elite Wrestling, Jon Moxley became the Ace of the challenger brand's pro wrestling universe. Proudly carrying the AEW World Heavyweight Championship as a talismanic figure on multiple occasions, he's been a money-drawing flag-bearer and the most reliable holder of the gold each time he's stepped in to the spot.
Dean Ambrose could have offered all of that to WWE once upon a time, but a creative team that never understood the man behind the post-Shield madness was as doomed to failure as the 2016 title reign itself. Given the keys to SmackDown Live as the brand was saved from Raw re-run hell in 2016, Ambrose couldn't shake the silly stigmas that had been attached to his goofy persona since the 'Hounds Of Justice' fell apart two years earlier.
His title defences never really felt as big a priority as whatever the likes of John Cena and AJ Styles were up to on Tuesday nights, and never was this more apparent than when he was brought into their world. Rapidly dropping the gold to 'The Phenomenal One', he was saddled with James Ellsworth in a clear sign that it was back to the top of the upper midcard for yet more exhausting "comedy".
If anything, his reign is best (?) remembered for an infamous podcast interview with Stone Cold Steve Austin, where Ambrose found himself trapped between his own aloof attitude to life and not wanting to scorch the earth that paid his bills in front of an all-time icon struggling to understand what made him tick. His WWE exit interview with Chris Jericho in 2019 became a more famous long form chat, but Mox was in no position to incinerate everybody from Vince McMahon downwards when he first sat down with 'The Texas Rattlesnake'.