Ranking EVERY WWE Champion From Worst To Best
23. Drew McIntyre
The WWE Championship has simultaneously evaded and defined Drew McIntyre's entire career in ways almost entirely unique to the man himself.
A quest for the richest prize drove him to make it to the company in the first place, but a realisation of just how far he'd fallen away from it by 2014 resulted in a complete career overhaul before his 2017 return. Achieving his destiny in 2020 was notoriously bittersweet thanks to the pandemic he oversaw, but - and this has since been scrubbed from the records because the time was so unrelentingly bleak - he oversaw it well.
Adopting the enforced gameshow host patter without ever compromising his character's values, the babyface Drew McIntyre was a good egg on the microphone who fought hard when it came time to do the difficult part of the job. Considering he typically had an audience of zero to do it all in front of and had the ignominy of completing his first defence of the belt mere minutes after winning it at a taped WrestleMania, it's little wonder his heel turn was so effective and loaded with long-simmering ammunition.