7 Amazing Wrestlers WWE Had No Plan For
2. Keith Lee
When Keith Lee came within a rolled shoulder of defeating Roman Reigns to leave Chicago's tri-branded edition of Survivor Series as the sole survivor in 2019, it was as if there had been a glitch in a desperately familiar matrix.
Lee represented Team NXT in the contest, and in a match where the likes of Walter (eliminated first, and spent less than three minutes in the bout), Shorty G (got slightly longer, but was still eliminated second out of the 15 men out there) and Damien Priest (cut down to size with relative ease thanks to an RKO elimination) were given short shrift, few expected to be basking in the future black-and-gold Champion's glory at the Allstate Arena. The match resembles how the company worked in a microcosm too; call-ups rarely fared well, in part because Triple H was so obsessed with in-ring critical acclaim that he forgot where he was sending his favourite wrestlers when he was done with them.
Lee outperformed the office's measured expectation in his electric closing sequence against Reigns, and did the same in a 2020 Royal Rumble cameo against Brock Lesnar, but by the time he was able to convert it into an actual main roster run, those same suited-up losers couldn't land on how best to use him. With no direction nor structure to Lee's early spell outside of a win over Randy Orton that was ultimately squandered, the over-correction birthed the risible "Bearcat" persona, growls-and-all. It bombed, Lee hated it, and the two sides weren't on terms by 2022.
Lee took (and still takes) some pelters for a Twitter post slightly sardonically sharing sympathy for his former Survivor Series teammate, following the renaming from Walter to Gunther back in 2022. To be absolutely fair to the man once believably billed as 'Limitless', he wasn't to know things would turn out so rosy for the 'Ring General' regardless of a new first name. And after this disastrous rebrand, had every reason to assume it would crash and burn too.