Ranking EVERY WWE Champion From Worst To Best
30. John Bradshaw Layfield
John Bradshaw Layfield winning the WWE Championship was sacrilegious when it first occurred.
Not only had the former APA man beaten Eddie Guerrero, but he'd done it mere weeks after being separated from Faarooq and rebadged as a heel, and in a Texas Bullrope match that played mostly to silence in the middle of a wretched Great American Bash card, and by virtue of Guerrero bundling him into the fourth corner and losing without realising.
It was commitment to the bit to give him the title and luxuriate in the bizarre visual of a perennial drab tag wrestler becoming WWE Champion, but it was an equal buy-in from Bradshaw that got the project over in the buildings. 279 days later, he used all the heat he'd built up in a Honky Tonk Man tightrope run to put over John Cena at WrestleMania 21.
Ending as it started though, the match stunk because Layfield was simply never that good. 'The Champ' was at long last here, but it would take further bludgeoning of the JBL character in their rematch to truly annoint him.