Ranking EVERY WWE Champion From Worst To Best
47. Jinder Mahal
Five years after Jinder Mahal’s bizarre and mostly-abysmal WWE Championship run, there was a move to reframe the whole thing as a noble failure rather than a completely inelegant and brainless one.
The crowd reactions at Backlash - the April 2017 event where Mahal dethroned Randy Orton in a bad and boring match that served as a primer for the quality of the rest of the run - were charming for half an hour because the disbelief was understandably real and justified. This was a generationally shocking call in every sense, to such an extent that most rational observers believed that a belt theft angle weeks prior was thought up simply to capture the preposterous visual of the ‘Modern Day Maharaja’ holding the illustrious prize. Instead, it foreshadowed a slump of a summer where defences against Orton and Shinsuke Nakamura clogged up television and pay-per-view time as WWE tried and failed to make greater in-roads into the Indian market.
If there was a single metric upon which the title reign could have been deemed a success, it would have been on the strength of the gates for Mahal working the shows on top as the heroic talisman. Ultimately, an Indian tour with a stadium show became a singular house show in which Mahal - by then not even the Champion having lost it in order to facilitate a good Champion Vs Champion match at that years’ Raw Vs SmackDown Survivor Series - lost to Triple H in a curio nobody is ever curious to learn about.
In old money, this would be considered as tanking the territory. By 2017, it was infuriatingly par for the course.