BRM Presents: The 10 Most Soul-Crushing Moments of 2015

[Big Red Machine]

In many ways, 2015 was not a fun year to be a wrestling fan. Yes, there was some great stuff, but we lost many idols and a lot of the major companies had some major booking problems (just watch any episode of Raw). As wrestling fans, we have trained ourselves to soldier through these bad times and still watch anyway, but some moments are so disappointing that they really do make you wonder if you shouldn't just give up any expectations of things getting better- at least for a while. Here are...

THE TOP 10 MOST SOUL-CRUSHING MOMENTS OF 2015:


10. RODERICK STRONG LOSES TO HIROSHI TANAHASHI AT ROH WAR OF THE WORLDS 2015: NIGHT 2
Look… Tanahashi is a HUGE name and New Japan has always protected him, so them insisting that he picks up the win isn’t at all unexpected… except that during this time, Roderick was being built up for a #1 contendership match at ROH’s next PPV while Tanahashi was involved in a storyline where he was constantly losing to New Japan’s resident comedy jobber Toru Yano.
If ever there was a time where New Japan could have thrown ROH a bone and let Tanahashi take a loss (JUST ONE), it was this one, but instead it reinforced to everyone that New Japan will never, ever, ever let any of their big four do a job, even when it would help a business partner in a match half a world away from home, and when that guy is spending his time at home losing to the most undercard guy on New Japan’s roster.

9. SAMI ZAYN’S INJURY
Sami Zayn is weeks away from a huge grudge match on an NXT Takeover special against Kevin Owens. Raw is in his home market and he gets the call to be shined up in the John Cena US Title Open Challenge… and he hurts his shoulder doing his entrance. Sami soldiered through it and put on a great match with Cena, and then also with Owens at Takeover… but then he needed surgery and all of his momentum was lost. Whenever something seems to be going right for a fan-favorite in WWE, it feels like it comes crashing down.

8. CESARO BECOMES A MID-CARDER AGAIN
I don’t need to tell you all how talented Cesaro is. In a company that has spent years criminally underutilizing everyone from Mark Henry to Nattie Neidhart to Daniel Bryan (hell… I’d argue that even THE MIZ is being underutilized), Cesaro might well be the most underutilized of all. What’s more amazing is that WWE has given him chances to have amazing matches and get over with the fans… and he ALWAYS does… and yet Vince always gets bored and stops pushing him. After his two AMAZING matches with John Cena earlier this year (two of WWE's five best of the year, IMO, with their second match probably ranking in the top five of the year from any company), I thought this might be the time they actually go with it… and then, a month later, he was back in the midcard.

7. GOTO LOSES THE IWGP INTERCONTINENTAL TITLE BACK TO NAKAMURA
The IWGP Intercontinental Title has been Shinsuke Nakamura’s thing for the past few years. He himself (okay, with some help from a trilogy of matches with Tanahashi in the winter of 2014) has taken a midcard belt and turned it into a legitimate main event attraction. But this means that Mr. Nakamura has pretty much faced everyone there is to face for the IC Title (aside from his stablemates Okada and Ishii), and that he has also been kept away from the IWGP Heavyweight Title for a few years. Meanwhile, Hirooki Goto has spent the past few years in that role of the guy who always comes close to winning the big titles, but just never gets it done. It has always felt like one big win and one good run could propel him up into the level of New Japan’s Big Four (Nakamura, Okada, Tanahashi, & AJ Styles), but he just never seemed to get that big win.
Then, this May at Wrestling Dontaku, Goto finally did it. He beat Nakamura to win the IWGP Intercontinental Title. Then he beat Nakamura again at Dominion. Then, in the G1, he even beat IWGP Heavyweight Champion Okada. With several challengers lined up via losses in the G1, Goto looked poised to have a nice long run with the title, getting the chance to prove that he can be a top guy…
And then, at the first big show after the G1, he dropped the title right back to Nakamura. With this one title change, New Japan confirmed in fans’ minds that the biggest criticism of the promotion- that almost all of the divisions were completely stagnant and nothing new would ever happen- was completely true.

6. THE BOOKING OF ALBERTO DEL RIO AS US CHAMPION
For years, fans had been complaining that WWE’s two undercard singles titles had been devalued to the point of being almost completely meaningless. And they were right. Then, around WrestleMania time, a report came out that one of WWE’s goals this year was to rebuild those titles, and they were going to do that by putting the belts on two of their top babyfaces, John Cena and Daniel Bryan, and then letting those two go out there and have killer matches with everyone. Fans rejoiced.
Daniel Bryan went down with an injury, killing the IC Title part of the plan, but aside from a rather poor idea to steal an angle that ROH had just done where the top singles champions would face off in a title vs. title match and have the heel win the match (which WWE quickly reversed the next month), the US Title was, in fact, elevated. Every week John Cena would come out and put on a great match with someone. Sometimes it was an established guy like Dean Ambrose. Sometimes it was a talented wrestler who wasn’t being utilized well at all like Stardust. Sometimes they were guys making their main roster debuts like Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens. But every week, we got great match for the US Title until Cena lost the belt in one of these open challenges to the returning Alberto Del Rio, and by the time that happened, the title had started to mean something again.
Then Del Rio almost never defended the belt and we were right back to where we started. While seeing all of that work go to waste was unfortunate and was a sign that WWE will never change, what was perhaps more damaging is that the fact that the writers stopped paying attention to the title once Cena lost it exposes the fact that these John Cena US Title Open Challenges were not done to elevate the title at all. The important part of the name wasn’t the “US Title” part or the “open challenge” part. It was the "John Cena" part, because the whole thing turned out to be a way to let Cena have great matches week after week. It feels like the whole thing was just a ploy to let Cena have the Match of the Night every show in the hopes that smarks would start cheering him again.

5. STEPH INTRODUCES THE DIVAS REVOLUTION
It has been almost a decade since fans started clamoring for better, more serious women’s wrestling in WWE. Then, last year, NXT actually started giving it to us, with an upheaval of the status quo spearheaded by Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch, & Charlotte (yeah, fine, and Bayley too). Meanwhile, on the main roster, Paige had been losing a war against the McMahon-backed Bella Twins and was looking for some new allies. Seems obvious how this should go, right?
Well instead, we got Steph randomly turning babyface for a night and announcing that there was going to be a “Divas Revolution,” with Steph announcing “these are our new Divas and now we’re going to have some factions, which are you, you, and you” like a teacher dividing the schoolchildren onto teams at recess. That moment was the beginning of the large series of mistakes that contributed to the complete and total failure of WWE’s “Divas Revolution,” and that was the moment we knew that WWE would ruin this just as they had ruined so many other good ideas.

4. CENA WINS HIS FEUD WITH KEVIN OWENS
One of the reasons why it’s important to protect your top stars is because if they rarely lose, then the few times they do lose can be played off as a REALLY big deal. John Cena has been extremely well protected by WWE over the past ten years (in fact, he’s been protected a bit too well). In Kevin Owens’ main roster debut, Owens beat Cena cleanly and instantly became a star. And this wasn’t just anyone. This was Kevin Owens: a guy who has, to be frank, nothing like the type of body WWE likes on their stars. Their feud progressed with Cena getting his win back, but Owens laying him out afterwards and actually putting Cena out for a week, something else I don’t remember happening very often.
Then came the third match in their series: the time to do what they failed to do in 2014 with Bray Wyatt and in 2013 with Ryback: to give him that big win a feud with John Cena in order to truly cement him as a top star. Instead, John Cena won cleanly and the next day, Owens was down to being a midcarder. Once again, WWE proved that they are refusing to learn from the past and ensuring that John Cena always comes out on top no matter what, no matter what the right long-term move for the promotion is.

3. ADAM COLE TURNS ON KYLE O’REILLY
Adam Cole had been ROH’s top heel for almost two years. Don’t get me wrong: he was great in the role. But it had been two years since he turned heel, and he was such a good wrestler that the smarky ROH crowds had started to cheer for him anyway, even when ROH put him with the much-despised pairing of Matt Taven and Michael Bennett.
So ROH started a storyline where it seemed like Cole was on his way to being kicked out the stable he himself had started, and he had started teaming with former tag team partner Kyle O’Reilly, one of ROH’s top babyfaes, even refusing to help Bennett and Taven in a beatdown of Kyle, the Young Bucks, and Bobby Fish, telling them he was done with them.
Then, when Kyle was about to win the ROH World Title in the main event of All-Star Extravaganza VII, Adam Cole turned on Kyle and cost him the title. The next night, Cole and his former comrades showed up and revealed that it had all been an evil plan all along. Not only was the main event of an ROH PPV marred by interference (going against the philosophy the company was founded with) for the second time this year, but in doing so, a story the fans had been excited for and a much-needed shake-up of the status quo was abandoned with the despised, clichéd, lazy, plot-hole filled explanation that it had been an evil plan all along. This one moment seemed to bring all of the criticism of ROH booker Delirious to the forefront and killed fan interest in a previously red-hot product (and, with hindsight, is the moment ROH’s booking started to head horribly downhill).

2. THE MAIN EVENT OF TNA’S DEBUT ON DESTINATION AMERICA
I’ve already said everything there is to say about this. Instead of a heavily-anticipated wrestling match, we got a plot-hole-filled segment full of nonsensical turns and interference in a world title match leading to yet another big heel faction in TNA. They had a second chance to make a first impression, but instead, TNA went with the same pat hand that they have been going with for so long that it got them into this crappy situation in the first place, and driving away all of the fans who were using this new beginning to give TNA another chance.
In some ways, I really want to make this 1B instead of 2, but I just couldn’t justify in light of…


1. DANIEL BRYAN IS ELIMINATED FROM THE ROYAL RUMBLE
Daniel Bryan was an underdog babyface so popular that fan support for him forced WWE to change their planned main event for WrestleMania so that instead of Orton vs. Batista, the show ended with Bryan winning the WWE World Heavyweight Title in the main event of the biggest show of the year. Then a freak nerve injury cut his title reign short, and there was talk he would never be able to wrestle again.
But he was able to make a comeback, and after the fans had spent the past few months rejecting WWE’s chosen one Roman Reigns, it seemed like Bryan being put in the Rumble was a sure sign that he would win it. After the disaster of last year’s Rumble- when the fans wanted Bryan instead of WWE’s chosen one and let their displeasure be known, there was no way WWE would make the same mistake again, right? If anything, the reaction this year would be worse because not only would the fans be denied a Bryan victory two years in a row, but last year’s show was in Pittsburgh while this year’s show was in the indy-Mecca of Philadelphia: the smarkiest city in the world- surely they couldn’t make the same mistake twice, right?

Well… they did, and the results were disastrous for WWE that night, but in some ways, they were worse for the fans. WWE’s complete and total blindness to a possibility that so many people had predicted that it seemed less like a probability and more like a certainty as to how the fans would react to what WWE planned to give them showed that no matter how loudly the fans told WWE want they wanted to see, WWE was going to ignore them and just do what they wanted to do instead.

[cero2k]

Awesome read Red, I think you really captured all of it. The only thing that I could think of adding is the unmasking of Sombra, it was really soul crushing for me, more that he lost it to Atlantis and not an up and comer.

THE TOP 10 MOST SOUL-CRUSHING MOMENTS OF 2015:

10. RODERICK STRONG LOSES TO HIROSHI TANAHASHI AT ROH WAR OF THE WORLDS 2015: NIGHT 2
When you think about it. Roderick had a 50/50 yr, aside from PWG, he didn't really win most of his big matches, he failed to capture the ROH title with Lethal, lost to Okada, Tanahashi, Nakamura twice, Alberto, I think he only had like two wins in EVOLVE. It was still his best yr ever, sucks that he couldn't take some bigger wins under the belt.

9. SAMI ZAYN’S INJURY
From your list, i think this is the only one that i think worked out for the best. It's hard to imagine what would have been of Zayn if he wasn't injured, it's hard to think that NXT would have slowed down Balor, and in the main roster, would he be doing better than Neville and Owens? With the injury I feel he comes back strong and with two instant feuds, one to regain the NXT title, and the other, far more important, to fight Owens.

I think a bigger soul crushing detail here are the overall injuries of the year. Kidd's injury definitely hurt Cesaro, Itami was barely rising to the main event (we all know he should have been the man at Tokyo), Rollins having to open the door for Sheamus being a champ, and most definitely, Dragon pretty much retiring from WWE ring.

8. CESARO BECOMES A MID-CARDER AGAIN

7. GOTO LOSES THE IWGP INTERCONTINENTAL TITLE BACK TO NAKAMURA
I think this applies to every single title in NJPW, Tag going back to BC, Ibushi failing to capture the IC or NEVER, Ishii regaining the NEVER, KUSHIDA losing the title just so he can get his Tokyo Dome moment, it almost feels like we're back to the beginning of 2015

6. THE BOOKING OF ALBERTO DEL RIO AS US CHAMPION
Like Alvarez says all the time, crazy how Alberto can be the biggest babyface in literally any promotion in the world, and WWE just can't figure it out. And in hindsight, you're right, the open challenge only elevated Cena to "Smarks like him now" status, but at the end of the day, the US title is still the US title

5. STEPH INTRODUCES THE DIVAS REVOLUTION
There's not much else to say that we haven't said a million times already. To think that Sasha Banks is dancing around with a unicorn horn on her head makes me sad

4. CENA WINS HIS FEUD WITH KEVIN OWENS
Momentum Killer Cena, don't forget that months prior he killed the tank-riding momentum Rusev had, months later he HAD to get his win back from Rollins, even if he was taking time off later anyway

3. ADAM COLE TURNS ON KYLE O’REILLY

2. THE MAIN EVENT OF TNA’S DEBUT ON DESTINATION AMERICA

1. DANIEL BRYAN IS ELIMINATED FROM THE ROYAL RUMBLE
The inevitable realization that fans don't matter and the WWE will always have an agenda.

[Big Red Machine]

Awesome read Red, I think you really captured all of it. The only thing that I could think of adding is the unmasking of Sombra, it was really soul crushing for me, more that he lost it to Atlantis and not an up and comer.

Thanks. I actually have a few more of these coming.

I had considered the Sombra thing, but learning that it happened because he was going to WWE made me leave it off the list.

THE TOP 10 MOST SOUL-CRUSHING MOMENTS OF 2015:

10. RODERICK STRONG LOSES TO HIROSHI TANAHASHI AT ROH WAR OF THE WORLDS 2015: NIGHT 2
When you think about it. Roderick had a 50/50 yr, aside from PWG, he didn't really win most of his big matches, he failed to capture the ROH title with Lethal, lost to Okada, Tanahashi, Nakamura twice, Alberto, I think he only had like two wins in EVOLVE. It was still his best yr ever, sucks that he couldn't take some bigger wins under the belt.
He was pretty well protected, though. He lost his TV Title match to Lethal in January because of Whitmer, and didn't lose cleanly against Lethal for the world title, either. In EVOLVE he at least got a non-title win over Drew before losing and in FIP he got to win the FIP Title. In ROH he had wins over Kyle and Fish when both were still tag champs, beat KUSHIDA, and won a three-way involving AJ Styles and Kyle O'Reilly. As for the others: I wish he could have won some of them, but I don't really see losses to guys like Tanahashi, Okada, Nakamura, and Alberto as being anything to be ashamed of.

9. SAMI ZAYN’S INJURY
From your list, i think this is the only one that i think worked out for the best. It's hard to imagine what would have been of Zayn if he wasn't injured, it's hard to think that NXT would have slowed down Balor, and in the main roster, would he be doing better than Neville and Owens? With the injury I feel he comes back strong and with two instant feuds, one to regain the NXT title, and the other, far more important, to fight Owens.

I think a bigger soul crushing detail here are the overall injuries of the year. Kidd's injury definitely hurt Cesaro, Itami was barely rising to the main event (we all know he should have been the man at Tokyo), Rollins having to open the door for Sheamus being a champ, and most definitely, Dragon pretty much retiring from WWE ring.
Good points
8. CESARO BECOMES A MID-CARDER AGAIN

7. GOTO LOSES THE IWGP INTERCONTINENTAL TITLE BACK TO NAKAMURA
I think this applies to every single title in NJPW, Tag going back to BC, Ibushi failing to capture the IC or NEVER, Ishii regaining the NEVER, KUSHIDA losing the title just so he can get his Tokyo Dome moment, it almost feels like we're back to the beginning of 2015
I see what you're saying and I don't disagree, but I think there is one major difference, which is that this time around, I don't think Bullet Club will be regaining any belts they lose any time soon.

6. THE BOOKING OF ALBERTO DEL RIO AS US CHAMPION
Like Alvarez says all the time, crazy how Alberto can be the biggest babyface in literally any promotion in the world, and WWE just can't figure it out. And in hindsight, you're right, the open challenge only elevated Cena to "Smarks like him now" status, but at the end of the day, the US title is still the US title

5. STEPH INTRODUCES THE DIVAS REVOLUTION
There's not much else to say that we haven't said a million times already. To think that Sasha Banks is dancing around with a unicorn horn on her head makes me sad

4. CENA WINS HIS FEUD WITH KEVIN OWENS
Momentum Killer Cena, don't forget that months prior he killed the tank-riding momentum Rusev had, months later he HAD to get his win back from Rollins, even if he was taking time off later anyway

3. ADAM COLE TURNS ON KYLE O’REILLY

2. THE MAIN EVENT OF TNA’S DEBUT ON DESTINATION AMERICA

1. DANIEL BRYAN IS ELIMINATED FROM THE ROYAL RUMBLE
The inevitable realization that fans don't matter and the WWE will always have an agenda.

[/quote]

[cero2k]

Awesome read Red, I think you really captured all of it. The only thing that I could think of adding is the unmasking of Sombra, it was really soul crushing for me, more that he lost it to Atlantis and not an up and comer.

Thanks. I actually have a few more of these coming.

I had considered the Sombra thing, but learning that it happened because he was going to WWE made me leave it off the list.

even looking at his face and new look, unmasking him wasn't that bad of an idea, it was just losing to a 50 yr old that annoyed me. If they already knew that he was leaving, then rush (no pun intended) a feud with RUSH and have him take the mask. I'd just been really annoyed at Atlantis for the last 2-3 yrs