Who REALLY Carried WWE Every Year (1985-2026)

Blossoming workhorse Daniel Bryan started his year as part of Team Hell No with Kane, but those tag performances were strong. By May, cracks started to appear in the duo, then WWE moved Bryan up a notch towards the main event scene. This is where the whole "B+ Player" saga began.

Beating Cena at SummerSlam was a real shock to the system, then Randy Orton cashed in MITB following a Triple H Pedigree. Piggy-backing on that narrative, Bryan beat Orton at Night Of Champions, was stripped of the belt the next night on Raw, then had a no contest with Randy at Battleground before putting him over at Hell In A Cell.

WWE bosses wanted to move on from him after that, clearly, but Bryan had become the apple of the audience's eye. Like CM Punk before him, those people wanted Daniel to buck the trend of chosen favourites like Cena, Orton and the like at the top of the tree. He had something very different to offer compared to those men. He knew it, they knew it and (deep down) even management knew it.

No amount of corporate kicking and screaming could stop Bryan's rise. It was unstoppable. 2013 was the start of that. Well, it could be argued that 2012 was really the start of it, but things swelled so much that WWE couldn't ignore the fanfare any longer by 2013. Again, they tried. They really, really tried.

Bryan had something countless workers struggled to attain though. He had an organic relationship with the core audience, and his matches were fantastic.