3. Their Youth Is Their Strength
Some would counter that a better way to add a fourth member would therefore be to add a veteran to the group. After all, what could possibly help this young group more than a old hand giving them some more legitimacy in their future endeavours moving towards mid card and maybe top card titles? And there is no doubt that it would make great television if the fourth member of the Shield was revealed not to be a younger hand but an older star who was mentoring the group from behind the scenes and now had decided to reveal himself to the WWE Universe. The trouble with this idea is the fact that the Shield have become great partly due to the fact that they are outsiders. They don't wear normal wrestling attire, they don't cut normal promos, they don't even come through the normal entrance to get to the ring before a match. One can't help but feel if an older hand was added to the mix then they would no longer be the upstarts everyone thought they were. Furthermore, they'd just be a group following the orders of someone else and much of the focus would turn from the Shield themselves to the older superstar. Some may say they could add an elder member the way Nexus added John Cena- by force but even that would turn the focus away from the Shield and to the oppressed babyface- as it did for the Nexus storyline with Cena seeming to dominate much of the proceedings after that.