WWE Royal Rumble: Roman Reigns and 4 Stars Who Should Have Won Previous Matches

These Royal Rumble matches would’ve been much better in hindsight if different people won.

The annual Royal Rumble match serves as a critical moment for many WWE superstars. It’s the match that leads to the most important moment for any of them: a World Title opportunity at WrestleMania. If a wrestler is chosen to win the Rumble match, it’s a clear sign the company has big plans for them for the future.

Determining a Rumble winner isn’t always easy. In most years, the powers-that-be have to look at the entire roster and figure out which one of them has the potential to be a big enough draw. It’s a major risk; once someone wins the Rumble, they have to go with that person no matter what.

But this hasn’t always been the case. There have been many occasions where the Rumble match winner wasn’t an up-and-coming star in need of a critical push. Instead, it was an established star who happened to win because those same powers-that-be thought that no one else on the roster was worthy of the main event. On other occasions, WWE bet on the wrong horse, and pushed the wrong person entirely.

This article proposes a revisionist look at previous Rumble matches. We’ll look at four Rumble matches and look at who would’ve been a better winner for that contest. We’ll also highlight the flaws that existed in the real winners, and how the proposed alternative winners would’ve made more sense than what really happened.

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4. Cesaro – 2013

John Cena won the 2013 Royal Rumble and went on to face the Rock for the WWE Championship. His victory was a foregone conclusion, because WWE was hell-bent on repeating the main event from WrestleMania XXVIII. They wanted Cena vs. Rock II so badly they’d do anything they could to ensure Cena and Rock would face off again.

By having Cena win, not only did it lead to a relatively boring and predictable Rumble match, but it also prevented WWE from using that illustrious match to build up a new star. At the time, WWE still had the two World Championships, and the World Heavyweight title was in dire need of new contenders.

They ended up going with Jack Swagger as a repackaged Tea Party sort of character, but the gimmick, and subsequent feud with Alberto del Rio, didn’t catch on fire as WWE hoped it would.

What WWE should’ve done instead was book Cesaro to win the Royal Rumble and challenge Alberto for the WHC. Cesaro was a spectacular yet underrated wrestler working on the pre-show, which was a major insult to his abilities. Even back in 2013, when he was still relatively new, many people both within WWE and outside it knew Cesaro was an excellent worker that could thrive with the right booking and gimmick.

Had Zeb Coulter taken Cesaro on as his charge instead of Swagger, and acted as a regular mouthpiece without the over-the-top Tea Party rhetoric, they could’ve built Cesaro up as a credible contender for Alberto’s world title. The matches they’d have had together would’ve been spectacular, as both Cesaro and Del Rio were noted for being great wrestlers.

Even if Cesaro lost at WrestleMania, it would’ve been a great feud and a great match. Cena could’ve found another means to find his way into the main event against the Rock. After all, they just thrust him into the world title picture now against A.J. Styles, even though there’s other contenders on the roster.

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3. Dean Ambrose – 2016

The 2016 Royal Rumble match was unique. For the first time ever, the defending champion put his title on the line in the Rumble match itself. The whole point of this match was to see if Reigns would walk out of the Rumble as champion. He didn’t, as he was eliminated by the surprise #30 entrant, Triple H. This set up an eventual WrestleMania confrontation between the Game and ‘the Guy’, but that match (and the entire ‘Mania PPV, for that matter) backfired spectacularly.

What made this a bad choice was that the last man in the ring alongside Triple H was none other than Dean Ambrose. Ambrose was presented as Reigns’ close friend and partner, and he stood alone against Triple H. It would’ve made much more sense for Ambrose to win, for several reasons.

First, it would’ve been a much more surprising result than Hunter winning. As surprising as it was to see him, seeing the boss’s son-in-law with the championship will always rub some people the wrong way.

Second, it would’ve told a much deeper story of Ambrose wanting to escape Reigns’ shadow and prove he’s the better wrestler. Ambrose had proved he was more popular in terms of fan reaction, and this win would’ve cemented the belief that he was good enough to strike out on his own.

Third, we’d have that much-desired Shield WrestleMania main event that has been desired by so many for so long. Dean Ambrose vs. Roman Reigns would’ve been a much more exciting and memorable main event than Reigns vs. Triple H. There would’ve been more intrigue, as many more would speculate that Ambrose might win.

What we got instead was a main event whose result was so predictable the audience booed the victorious Reigns out of the building.

2. Daniel Bryan & Roman Reigns – 2015

There hasn’t been a double winner of the Royal Rumble match since 1994. Back then, Lex Luger & Bret Hart were deemed co-winners of the match. That led to far more intrigue in the subsequent weeks on who’ eventually main event WrestleMania.

This was something that WWE should’ve done in 2015. They knew that Daniel Bryan was going to be in the match. They knew he’d get the biggest reaction out of anyone else in the contest. Finally, they knew that, in comparison, Reigns wouldn’t get the desired reaction.

So instead, of feeding off those powerful emotions, WWE killed Daniel Bryan’s Rumble dreams after only ten minutes. Then the crowd turned nasty. The fan response was so overwhelmingly negative that they even booed the Rock.

They should’ve planned for something like this. What they should’ve done was have Bryan and Reigns eliminate each other just like Luger and Hart did in 1994.

The story would’ve been simple. On one hand, Bryan would look to recapture his glory from the previous year’s WrestleMania. On the other hand, Reigns would be going in as the new top dog. Sure, the fans in attendance would cheer for Bryan and boo Reigns; that was a foregone conclusion.

But if WWE allowed these two men to have a brief singles match as the final two participants, it would’ve lessened the negativity of the match. Had the two of them eliminated each other, WWE could’ve booked a rematch at Fast Lane to determine who really deserved to be in the main event.

While they did actually do this last match, it was only because the fan opposition to Reigns was so vociferous. An actual match between these two men for that coveted ‘Mania main event spot would’ve made much more sense than a thrown-together match that was done solely because the reaction was so bad.

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1. Roman Reigns – 2014

WWE pulled the trigger on Roman Reigns a year too late. Had they booked him to win the Royal Rumble in 2014, odds are the WWE landscape (and Reigns’ career) would be in a very different place right now.

Daniel Bryan’s ‘Yes Movement’ was so powerful by this point that the fans rejected everyone that represented Vince McMahon’s pre-planned vision, most notably Batista. Vince was adamant that the fans would love Batista vs. Randy Orton in the main event of WrestleMania XXX.

The fans wanted none of that and cheered all of the heels, including Roman Reigns. But there was more to Reigns at that time, as well. He was playing the silent powerhouse of the Shield, a soft-spoken badass that let his actions do the talking. He was getting over organically, and wasn’t being forced down fans’ throats as the ‘chosen guy’ in the way he was in 2015 and onwards.

WWE could’ve made a last-minute decision to go with Reigns as the winner and it would’ve made a world of difference. It was painfully obvious Batista was returning solely to main event WrestleMania XXX, which created its own set of problems. A guy that hadn’t been in WWE for four years facing off against a 12-year veteran in Orton. Way to be fresh and adaptive, WWE.

Randy Orton vs. Roman Reigns might not have been as exciting as Daniel Bryan, but at least it wouldn’t have led to Batista’s return being such an abysmal failure. He could’ve had some other role for WrestleMania, and wouldn’t have been perceived as a flop.