BRM Presents: The Biggest "Potential" Flops of 2015

[Big Red Machine]

Normally a "potential flop" is a risk that could have failed spectacularly, but didn't. This is not that. Instead, this is a list of things that seemed to have so much potential, but where creative completely missed the ball, and as a result, an idea that should have been a big success wound up as a flop. They are judged based on how good things were going before they got f*cked up, which means that ideas had potential but were never explored will probably be closer to #10 whereas major angles being f*cked up by bad booking will be closer to #1.

HONORABLE MENTION: Evil Emma
It’s not that Evil Emma is bad or anything; she’s just generic… which is unfortunate because she seemed to have the potential to be a much deeper character when she first got back down to NXT and started to feud with Bayley: Someone who had a run in WWE and didn’t do well and got demoted and was trying to force Bayley not to make the same mistakes she herself had made- even though to do so would mean giving up everything it means to be Bayley. From there, she could have transitioned into a desperate heel, willing to win at all costs in order to make it back up to the main roster.

10. BABYFACE CHAMPION CHARLOTTE
We got a bit of this, but not really on the main roster. There was so much untapped potential here, and turning her heel before at least giving us Charlotte vs. Sasha at Mania is criminal. Hell… they could have run with her as a top babyface for years. Have her beat Nattie at Mania this year and hold the belt for over a year. You can even do the story where Nikki Bella wants to stop Charlotte from breaking her record. You can do the story where Becky gets frustrated and turns on her. There’s so much you could do! Have her get screwed out of the belt by a heel in late fall, have that heel lose the belt to Sasha in the winter and then do Charlotte vs. Sasha at Mania next year. SOOOO much they could have done here.

9. COLBY CORINO IN ROH
Colby was a brilliant addition to the Whitmer vs. Corino feud, but I think he was very underutilized as a worker. I don’t know how good he is in the ring, but I’d assume he’s at least competent because he’s been working for a few years already. It just felt like there was so much more they could have done with him being Page and Whitmer’s whipping boy in the ring, and it wouldn’t have hurt to show Colby actually getting something out of his relationship with Whitmer and Page so that he doesn’t come across as a total idiot for basically volunteering to be their stooge.

8. NAOMI AS THE TOP FEMALE BABYFACE
Instead of giving us the same thing we’d been getting for nearly a year straight with Paige in the title picture, WWE seemed poised to make Naomi the new top babyface, but instead they decided to randomly turn her heel.

7. KANE TURNS BABYFACE ON SETH ROLLINS
They really missed the boat on this. He should have turned when he was super-hot in May, but instead they saved it until September when no one really cared anymore. Then they decided to fill it all with comedy segments and goofy supernatural bullsh*t, which killed it even more.

6. NEVILLE ON THE MAIN ROSTER
They brought him up, gave him a bit of a push by having him get to the finals of King of the Ring and trying to keep him looking strong, but by the time the summer began, they had already lost interest, and as a result, one of the men who helped make NXT the successful brand it is today is now a midcarder meandering around doing nothing, which is likely where he will remain for the next eight or ten years... if he sticks around that long.

5. BRAM VS. MAGNUS
This was a feud that built up fantastically well, with almost everything they did (with the exception of one or two segments) being BY FAR the best thing about TNA in the early Destination America era. Then it just ended abruptly with nothing that felt like a blow-off match and was never spoken of again.

4. MIZ-DOW BABYFACE TURN
This is basically the opposite of Kane’s babyface turn. WWE struck while the iron was at its hottest… except instead of using what they made, they just took the new iron implement they had worked so hard on and threw it in the trash.

3. THE RETURN OF KING OF THE RING
WWE brings back the ever-popular King of the Ring tournament and tells us how prestigious it is... and then proceeds to bury the guy who won it deep, deep under the ground, all the way to the mantle.

2. ADAM COLE’S BABYFACE TURN
The fans were going to cheer Cole whether he was a heel or a face, and keeping him in the Kingdom was only hurting a top heel group by giving them cheers, so turning him babyface seemed like the natural thing to do. They even set it up with a great story, and the fans really took to Cole’s babyface turn… and then ROH undid it all by revealing the whole thing to be a face-palm-inducing ruse.

1. MAGNUS VS. JAMES STORM
A great feud that had everyone on the edge of their seats waiting to see not only when the shoe would drop, but which shoe would it be? Would Storm manipulate Magnus into being so overprotective of Mickie that she would dump him? Or would Storm do something horrible and terrible to Mickie after gaining her trust?
The answer turned out to be the latter, but instead of with the grace and reality the feud has been known for, it was in the form of Storm revealing his evil plan to Mickie, and then apparently murdering her when she didn’t want to go along with it. All of this was captured via public security camera, but not only did TNA decided to play this attempted homicide on their show, but they didn’t follow up on these shocking but clearly pre-taped events at all that week- and followed them up idiotically the next week. Essentially, TNA killed what should have been their feud of the year with one idiotic series of pre-tapes.