7 Amazing Wrestlers WWE Had No Plan For
From Big Bill to Big Bill Goldberg, WWE has a habit of finding the bad lurking within the brilliant
It'd be unfair to say WWE didn't have a plan for Steve Austin when they secured his signature in late 1995. Problem was, the plan absolutely reeked.
A guy who had shown outstanding technical ability blended with an effortless heel charisma who then got to sharpen up his verbals as part of ECW's creative sandbox, Austin couldn't have been more prepared for his time with the market leader, making it all the more arrogant and bewildering that they cast him as a guy that needed Ted Dibiase's advice bell-to-bell and to speak for him in promos as his mouthpiece-come-manager.
When Austin eventually shook him off in storylines, it was still only because Dibiase had decided to jump to World Championship Wrestling to eventually play "benefactor" for the New World Order. That was some inspired creative, but it wasn't as good as what 'The Texas Rattlesnake' got up to right around the same time. 'The Ringmaster' had become Stone Cold, and some crap catchphrases made way for Austin 3:16. And the bottom line, if you'll allow the patter theft from the great man himself, was that Plan B eventually went far better than the first big swing.
"Amazing" is a big word, and Steve Austin was - by every metric - an amazing wrestler. It often takes the combination of performer and promotion working in sync to realise a wrestler's true potential, but wasting that potential is what takes amazing and makes it average. Such was the case with...
7. Big Cass
You can't teach being seven foot tall, but the artist formerly known as Big Cass appeared extremely coachable during an All Elite Wrestling run that resulted in far more changes than just his second name. Cass became Bill, but Bill became one of the most rounded, comedically gifted and versatile performers in the entire company between 2022 and 2026.
Rebounding from some difficult years personally, the professional rebirth of the character was revelatory. Bill still had killer offence and size on his side, but he was absolutely hilarious with it. There was a cheeky, charming side to his bullish cruelty to the point that he looked just as thrilled to be sucking on a lollipop or mimicking wiping his own ass with treasured possessions as he did beating up babyfaces. He perfected a specifically wicked vibe, and with it struck gold. An unexpected union with Ricky Starks drew acclaim and an AEW Tag Team Title run, now preserved in meme amber thanks to it falling during the specific spell Starks entered into an "Aw Dude" war with Adam Copeland.
Unfortunately, things petered out when he fell into the Jericho Vortex, which, incidentally, wasn't made better when the company tried to hang a lampshade on the term coined for wrestlers that worked against or with 'The Ocho' and saw their own opportunities diminish. "Tony Fumble" is a braindead term coined by grifters to describe a wrestler that's had a better time of it outside of Tony Khan's organisation, but Bill undoubtedly felt like one of the bigger missed opportunities when he departed for pastures old.
Video packages from WWE presenting him as a dark, muted monster didn't exactly inspire hope alongside the hype, and a promo about "stacking bodies" became cursed when he managed to stack precisely one before going on a televised losing streak. It reeked of half-baked ideas being forced together, rather than a coherent strategy of success. Everything can change in an instant of course, it's wrestling. But with Cass, it's all the stranger that these became the parameters for some eventual topline success.