The Biggest Problem With The 2015 Royal Rumble Match

The 2015 Royal Rumble has come and gone and the WWE Universe is currently up in arms. The #CancelWWENetwork movement is dominating social media at the moment and the vast majority of fans wren’t very happy with the event. But this is WWE after all, so chances that the voices of the fans will fall on deaf ears are all but guaranteed.

The Royal Rumble pay-per-view had its high points and its low points. The WWE Championship match was especially phenomenal and the undercard was pretty entertaining, and then there’s the rumble match itself. Going into this Royal Rumble match the crew here at Still Real To Us built it up to ourselves to be one of the best rumble matches in recent memory. Looking at the names involved and rumored surprise entrants it seemed almost impossible for WWE to drop the ball on this one, but somehow they did the impossible.

What was the biggest problem with the Royal Rumble? Was it Roman Reigns winning? No. You can hate on Roman Reigns all you want but his victory honestly wasn’t the worst part of the match. From where we’re sitting the problem was booking.

We’re not experts in the world of professional wrestling and we will never claim to be. All we are is fans and we can only tell you how we see it from a fan’s perspective. Our biggest problem was that the rumble match had so many fan favorites everyone wanted to cheer for and for some baffling reason WWE decided to make them all look as weak as Colin Delaney would if he were in a match against Brock Lesnar.

The WWE didn’t want Daniel Bryan to win and that’s ok. He didn’t have to win. But did they have to eliminate him so early? From a personal standpoint I didn’t necessarily want Bryan to win but I wanted the chance to get emotionally invested in his quest to win the Royal Rumble and that chance was taken away from me. His early elimination was a sign of things to come.

The WWE didn’t want Dolph Ziggler to win and that’s ok. But did he have to be such a non-factor in the match itself? Dolph is known for stealing the show and he’s a huge fan favorite but he had about as much impact on the match itself as a snowflake would have on an erupting volcano. We dare you to recall one moment where the show off was able to shine last night and you won’t be able to do it because he was just another number.

The match itself was bottom heavy and top light. For the first 10 entrants or so the match was on fire. Between the surprise entrants and Bray Wyatt’s superb performance it was looking like this thing was going to be a classic. By the time we got to the second half of the match there was nothing to get invested in. The outcome was obvious.

We all knew that Roman Reigns was being built up for a Royal Rumble victory this year but it would have been nice to see the WWE put in some extra effort in an attempt to fool us. By the time we got to the final four it was a foregone conclusion as to who would be walking out the winner. A final four made up of Reigns and a few select fan favorites such as Ziggler, Bryan and Ambrose or possibly Wyatt and Ryback would have at least kept everyone guessing.

Wrestling is a genre of entertainment built on disbelief. Although everyone knew in the back of their mind that Roman would win, we wanted to believe for a second that someone else could take it home. We wanted to believe that anything could happen in the WWE and the way the match was booked the fans weren’t granted that opportunity.

That is the biggest problem with the 2015 Royal Rumble match.