The Rumble itself has been pretty
for like...a good 5 or 6 years straight, but even by those standards I was pretty baffled at the last ten minutes or so. Nia Jax's involvement at all was
, but then she gets in the ring and has dudes bumping around for her, but they're all hesitant to even touch her despite her being bigger than almost everyone still involved and throwing dudes around. She then eliminates Mustafa Ali, a guy who eliminated Joe and Nakamura and recently pinned Daniel Bryan, with ease. Then when Orton hits her with the RKO it's treated like the most devious thing he's ever done and Rey is having a crisis of faith by hitting her with the 619. In the end it took a super kick/619/RKO rush and Orton/Rey double teaming her to eliminate her....but for what? They're obviously not going to book her against men, she's already double the size of everyone in the women's division and regularly gets big spots where she dominates half the roster at the same time.
Then there was the shit where for what seems like the 6th year in a row Dog Ziggler swears he's not going to be at the show and is on a hiatus or leaving the company and is in the Rumble as usually and nothing about that shit is mentioned again. Legit I'm pretty sure he's done this every year since 2014. But then there was the big table spot so you'd forget about Seth and whatever happened to Braun that had him missing for a while leading to Andrade/Ziggler being the "final" 2 men and the crowd was not buying that shit in the least
Seth winning is whatever, they should have done this LAST year when he was red hot again and had all the juice instead of killing his will to live by booking him with Ziggler for 6 months and then Ambrose for the rest of the year.
Both women's matches were really good, their Rumble I thought was fine, nothing really stood out to me besides how they had Rhea Ripley and Charlotte in the match together for a significant chunk of time and they never interacted at all. Ripley's entire gimmick and look right now is because people kept comparing her to Charlotte, so she butched it up, started power lifting, and got mean as hell. Instead we got what felt like 5 instances of Charlotte and Liberty Bell having their "epic" stand off.
AJ/Bryan had a match that wasn't right for the venue or show of that length. That same match in an arena in Chicago not 4 hours into a show could have been
but that type of methodical, slow, ugly, psychology based match in front of a already worn out crowd in a stadium just didn't gel.
at Erik Rowan being Danny's big vegan heavy. I swear he was wearing a Sabu shirt, too.
Brock/Balor was pretty good for what it was. I'd like to think there's a background story of all these smaller guys starting to crack the Brock code, finally culminating with Seth being able to put together what AJ/Bryan/Balor have done and dethrone him at WM, but I'm sure that's not intentional storytelling from WWE. Whatever the case, get the title off of Brock and if he's going to stick around, just have him pop in for "dream matches" every few months. There's a reason why Andre was never champion. Much like Brock, he was the special attraction and didn't NEED the belt. In an attempt to also make the Universal Championship a special attraction, all Brock having the belt has done is hold the entire Raw roster hostage and no one being able to break out or move up for 2 years. Just throw him on the big 4 against someone who is hot but not in a title match and call it a day with him.
