That image is one you’re not going to be seeing for a while. Seth Rollins was injured in Dublin, Ireland, suffering a torn ACL and is out for 6 to 9 months. As a result he forfeited the WWE championship and there’s going to be a tournament at Survivor Series. This is two years in a row that the company’s plans have been thrown off kilter due to injuries. Besides Seth, Randy Orton is out with a shoulder injury and Daniel Bryan went down again shortly after WrestleMania and hasn’t come back yet (if he ever is going to come back). Rollins was supposed to do a program with Roman Reigns for the WWE title over the next few months but that’s obviously a no go now. So…what do they do with this situation?
Option 1: Turn Roman heel and plug him in as the new face of the Authority
This is the first thing that people came up with on Twitter as soon as the news broke. It’s an easy quick fix; Roman and Dean make the tournament final, the Authority helps Roman win the title. It would resemble what happened in 1998 at Survivor Series, when the presumed good guy The Rock was assisted by Vince McMahon to win the vacant title and become the corporate champion. Of course having two men from literally the same family get the title in the same fashion at the same show of the year would be the height of irony.
The drawbacks? A few. For one, they’ve put in a lot of time to get Roman back on the good side of the fanbase after a lot of them turned on him after he won the Royal Rumble and flushing it is not what you want to do unless Roman going heel has always been the plan in the first place. Second, Roman doing the coward heel act isn’t all that believable. He could go all Brock Lesnar and be a brutal, badass, not give a crap about the rules heel but that might have the wrong effect and cause a large part of the fanbase to cheer him.
Option 2: Sheamus cashes in Money in the Bank on the tournament winner and screws them out of the title.
Sheamus has got to cash in that briefcase sometime. If he was supposed to cash in on Rollins anyway, then just do it now and have him lose the title at the Royal Rumble (no way Sheamus is gonna be the WWE champion in a match at WrestleMania). And by doing this you can get a quick elevation of someone besides Roman by having them win the tournament then get screwed by Sheamus afterward. I’m thinking Dean or Cesaro here; having Roman get screwed twice in one year by a Money in the Bank winner would be a bit much. Then you can have Dean/Cesaro work with Sheamus through the Rumble until he drops the title there.
Why not? I don’t see any problems with this, but a lot of people just aren’t trying to see Sheamus as champ, period. But that ship sailed when he won Money in the Bank.
Option 3: Roman wins as a face
Everybody knows they want to crown Roman champion at some point. So just do it now and get the train rolling already. Give him his run and if it doesn’t take move on next year.
Why not? The same concerns about Roman that have always been there. Can’t do the long promo segment that the big dog of the company gets every week and while he’s better in the ring now there’s still a question as to whether or not he can carry a match against the Mark Henry’s of the world when you need a one-off title defense on a pay per view show. That’s what the champ needs to be able to do. Check Seth’s match last month with Kane or the matches John Cena had with Ryback and Henry in 2013 for examples. And if you start Roman’s reign (see what I did there?) now then what about Sheamus’s cash-in? Do you still have Sheamus win the title from the guy you’ve wanted to put it on for over a year or do you have a failed cash-in attempt this time around? And lastly what if the crowd responds to a Roman title win the same way they responded to him winning the rumble last year? Not good.
Option 4: Old reliable
Oh would that piss some people off…….you know who I’m talking about. This guy:
Just kidding. Cena has been the fallback option in the past, like last year when Daniel Bryan got hurt. I don’t see them going back to that well here.
Option 5: Surprise Us
They could just do something different entirely. Have Kevin Owens it. Or Dean, or Alberto Del Rio. Anything’s possible.
Stroke of Genius 