7 Times WWE Tried To Unbury Someone (& Failed!)
For those times in WWE when digging around for new ideas often just made the hole even deeper
There was a period during World Wrestling Entertainment's monopoly era where burials didn't just feel like a reality of the business model but a part of the "fun".
The market leader leader was only really leading the market by default, and though WrestleManias were filling stadiums, nothing else during the remaining 51 weeks of the year ever seemed to matter. Ratings concerns from networks were offset by repeated rolling out of whichever legends were available for a cheap pop and a payday, very few wrestlers discernibly ascended or descended, the concept of a meritocracy was long dead, and hoping for your favourites to have good days in their shoot wrestling jobs replaced fantasy booking long or short term stories for them within the fiction.
It reached such a nadir that even burials didn't mean what they'd used to. In prior years (and thankfully, once again from 2019 in All Elite Wrestling and 2022 in WWE), performers could be made and broken by big wins and losses, such was the importance of booking. By the mid-2010s and into the early 2020s, the worst week of a character's life could be erased within seven days because burials mattered as little as wins and losses. This was the lone positive - the flicker of light in the long tunnel that was being a WWE Superstar during that time.
Even those that benefitted the most from this chaotic era weren't immune...
7. Jinder Mahal
On the January 15th 2024 edition of Monday Night Raw, World Heavyweight Champion Seth Rollins defeated Jinder Mahal because any other finish would have been utterly preposterous. The pair were leagues apart by every metric, and Rollins disposed of 'The Modern Day Maharaja' as such, though he didn't escape unscathed. 'The Architect' suffered a torn meniscus and MCL that very nearly kept him out of a WrestleMania XL he ultimately had loads to do with.
What a disastrous bit of business this could have been, particularly when revisiting the pathetic online bubble controversy that surrounded it. Raising a point about what he perceived to be double standards from certain outlets, AEW president Tony Khan fired out a post on X about how Mahal had lost and lost for years and was getting a title shot out of the blue with nobody flagging a problem, despite him facing backlash for giving Hook - at that point one of his most winningest wrestlers - a shot at Samoa Joe's gold around the same time.
Mahal replied questioning who Hook even was, and the narrative around the bout suddenly took on a life of its own, with WWE trying in vain to ratchet up the buzz around former WWE Champion Mahal, even though his very reign reflects just how far standards had fallen in the company when he was given the gold. With Khan and WWE appearing extremely petty, Mahal gaining no momentum and Rollins actively finding his halted, this attempted unburial did more to heap dirt on literally everybody involved.