WWE And TNA: 7 Worst Moments Of The Week (Feb 5)
1. Orton Wins The Rumble
Randy Orton won the Royal Rumble in 2009. All it lead to was a boring match with Triple H at that year’s WrestleMania. The following year he was relegated to the third match at Mania by facing off against Ted DiBiase and Cody Rhodes. The year after that he got Punk before he became a superstar. At Mania 28—while his contemporary John Cena battled The Rock in the main event—he was doing the job to Kane, who had just jobbed to Cena the month before at Elimination Chamber.
I guess I’m going a roundabout way of saying that Orton has peaked as a character. This isn’t a new thing either. Orton has been stale for years. He has become Blandy Boreton...which I wish would be a thing. Even when he had the WWE Title and was facing off against Daniel Bryan he wasn’t that interesting. Maybe it was all the heel and face turns, or all the backstage incidents that lead to his career never quite taking off like we thought it would over a decade ago. Maybe he just never had it in him to be a true legacy guy (despite the name of his stable). So all of that makes it incredibly confusing and disappointing that he won the Royal Rumble in 2017.
Even if you look past all that and look at what he's doing currently, it’s still really bad. As a whole, fans don't care about The Wyatt Family anymore. They haven't really since Bray lost to Cena in their feud. Sure, people turn on their phones in the arena when they walk off, but that just means the entrance is over. Adding a major title into the mix isn’t going to do much for Bray and Orton, because we never really bought into them as a unit in the first place. They couldn’t even hold onto the tag titles against American Alpha, who are rarely on the show!
In my mind, this marks five years in a row of bad Rumble winners. Sheamus wasn’t a great call in 2012, but at least they tried to make something out of him for a bit. Cena sure as hell didn’t need it the following year, and Batista, Reigns and Hunter were infuriating in their own ways. Maybe WWE will get it right one of these years, or maybe Big Show will win next year for the hell of it.
Time to kick out.