It's time for everyone's favorite PPV of the year. Whether or not the product is good doesn't really matter, the Rumble always finds a way to deliver. With that being said let's look at the card:



The show kicks off with two of the most lol gimmicks we've seen in a very long while. Adam Rose was so terrible they were forced to turn him heel to try to save any hope of him making it at all. The WWE somehow outdid themselves by creating a faction that gets even less of a reaction than Rose. For some reason two of the best wrestlers in the company have decide to join Adam Rose and take on the New Day.

Prediction:

Cesaro and Kidd do a bunch of awesome moves and find a way to make this trainwreck of a match interesting. In the end New Day picks up the victory and still gets no crowd reaction.



Next we have The Ascension vs. The New Age Outlaws. Ever since their debut The Ascension have being boasting that they are better than all the legends. JBL has buried them on commentary for this. This resulted in the Ascension getting a beat down from The NWO, APA, and New Age Outlaws on Raw Reunion.

Prediction:

The Ascension should win in a squash similarly to The Shield at Wrestlemania when they faced the NAO. If not don't expect to see The Ascension on a PPV card again any time soon.



I honestly don't know what the build to this is. I'm guessing it has something to do with Total Divas?

Prediction:





We follow that up with the Usos vs. Miz and Sandow. Sandow has been getting a face reaction and Miz has been getting a heel reaction. This has led to Miz getting upset and eventually costing them the tag titles.

Prediction:

The Usos win and this leads to Miz and Sandow splitting up. I hope I'm wrong because I want to see a spot in the rumble where Miz gets eliminated and Sandow eliminates himself.



This match should be great. The build has been good, and adding Seth to the mix will help spice up the Brock/Cena match we've seen before.

Prediction:

Brock should never be loosing here but it is WWE after all. Regardless I'm still going to pick Brock to retain the title. Rollins will eat the pin so Cena doesn't have to technically lose.

Finally we have the 30 man Royal Rumble match. This match almost always delivers in some type of fashion. Will we see a repeat of last years Royal Rumble where the crowd completely turns on the match? Seems like a very possible scenario. The rumble is always good for a couple returns and surprise entrants. The returns are likely to be:





And rumors are that the surprise entrants could be:



The winner of the match is really a two horse race. It's either going to be:



or



Prediction:

As much as my heart wants it to be Bryan, my head keeps saying Reigns. I predict Reigns to win the Royal Rumble and beat Brock at Wrestlemania.

Overall should be a pretty good show. The result of the title match should tell us a lot about what is going to happen in the rumble. Whether Bryan or Reigns wins will dictate how most feel about this show.

Also let us never forget the 2005 Royal Rumble commercial:

I would pay 9.90 to watch the Rumble and the 3 way match, and 9 cents to see Miz vs Usos. They would have to pay me 9.99 to watch the other 3 matches.

Goddamn, the builds for these matches have been awful.

The 3-way should be really good, especially with the Philadelphia crowd.

Rumble is almost always entertaining.

OMG, that commercial. Seems I was missing some really solid stuff by not watching wrestling in 2005...

great op
let us rumble

Triple threat match and royal rumble are gonna be great, rest will suck. Why? Because the other matches had no build up whatsoever. It's basically the two matches I mentioned and the rest is filled in with a typical RAW card.

I won't be as mad if Reigns wins the rumble so long as we get Bryan vs. Lesnar at mania. Lesnar vs. Reigns will not be a good match. I'd love to see Rollins vs. Reigns, but the problem with this is that WWE doesn't want to put a bunch of B+ players in the main event of Wrestlemania. They've shown over the past couple years that the way they fish for Wrestlemania buys is by putting the most popular stars in the main event. Rock, Cena, Batista, Lesnar, etc.

SO if Reigns wins the Rumble, the only way I can see them having the title match go on last would be if he was wrestling Cena or Lesnar. If Bryan doesn't win the rumble that means in order for the Bryan-Lesnar match to go down, Cena vs. Reigns goes on last for WM31 as sort of a passing of the torch match.

EDIT: BUT they can't do that either because CENA WINS LOL and REIGNS WINS LOL in front of a Philly crowd would be a complete ****storm. Excited to see what will happen!

I like Joey Styles idea. Brock loses the title without being pinned. Enraged he forces his way into the rumble, destroys everyone and wins it.

wat

Isn't he just like three months from leaving? At some point we can stop having every one of his appearances make the whole audience think that he's way better than the roster that's sticking around, right?

Mind you, he is actually better than everyone, but if you're the WWE you're quickly running out of time to spend the capital you built up and invested in this guy.

Realistically - and I hate that I'm saying this - Reigns needs to win the Rumble for pretty much that exact reason. Brock has 3 months left and they've invested a ****load in making him larger than life. He's won feuds vs Taker, HHH, Cena, and Punk. All four of those guys at the time were billed as the biggest thing basically. Taker at WM is obvious, Cena is obvious, Punk was just off becoming the longest title reign in the modern era, and HHH came out of retirement to try and stop him or whatever that feud was about. He conquered them all.

So with him leaving, they need to cash in on that aspect. Having Cena go over him this Sunday won't make it worthwhile. Cena is already the face of the company. It doesn't do anything for the future. Having Rollins win could work in theory, except they've made damn certain to make him a non-credible threat due to the authority. Rollins beating him doesn't catapult him into the stratosphere of the WWE hierarchy. I know we all want Bryan, but the fact of the matter is Bryan is ALREADY huge, is 33 years old coming off of a major neck problem, and can't be a guarantee to use this rocket to lead the company for the next decade.

This can't be some already mega over dude just adding another feather to the cap. Undertakers streak was in a weird position where you wanted to use it for this purpose, but the backlash for any non-megastar actually doing it would be too large. They got through the issue by making it be Brock that did it - someone that was credible, but then could use that to shoot the new guy up. It's in the same spot as The Streak with established mega stars (another feather in the cap makes no sense) but it doesn't have the downside of a new person doing it being **** on.

Brock losing HAS to be used for something long term. They've invested two years and the ****ing streak to create a situation where whoever beats Brock is instantly at the top. Using it on people already there or people that realistically may not be around in 10 years anymore (Bryan/Cena) just doesn't get out enough.

I'm not a Reigns fan. But it needs to be him for the long term gain of Brocks entire run these last few years imo. Nobody else is in that position that Reigns is.

Good post but my counterpoint is although they'd want to use Lesnar to full effect, wouldn't putting Reigns in, risk wasting that Lesnar push? If Reigns Lesnar didn't come off well enough for Reigns to benefit for long, then the same waste happens in regards of what they've invested in Lesnar. Yes Reigns winning Rumble could be more beneficial than Bryan if Bryan's career is a lot shorter, but it's also conceivable a Bryan push actually ends up more beneficial than Reigns if all the latter's would have led to is a short buzz and then fall off to mid card status. They don't need Bryan to be more over, but after winning the belt at Wrestlemania the benefits could be that they now have a credible champion to help put over heels too. If you want Seth Rollins to break through to superstar heel status? How about making him feud with a champion, epic over Bryan after WM? Or for example if they decided the Roman Reigns plan was actually to turn him heel using Bryan in this storyline would work too. Finally another thing is that I think short term success of making this WM as big as possible still matters to them, especially in light of wanting to juke the network's numbers. They could choose Bryan because they see Lesnar v Bryan as having the biggest upside in terms of buzz and anticipation because of Lesnar's build, Bryan's popularity and the David v Goliath narrative

I do understand your logic all the way through, but it somewhat feels like advocacy for throwing good money after bad. As in...they've already booked themselves into a really awkward position with this Brock stuff, and I don't see the answer as being "well let's force this guy over him, because dammit we can't just afford to waste this."

You have a fairly small part of the audience actively negative on Reigns - that would be folks like us - but beyond that, it seems like you have a significant part of the audience that would shrug at Reigns and say "he's okay." This after the company has tried like hell to get everyone on board for the better part of the last year. Meanwhile Brock is hugely over with everyone in one sense or another, and from what we saw on Raw the crowd is looking for an excuse to turn his way.

There's precious little to suggest that the crowd is really going to accept a hypothetical Reigns-over-Brock result at WrestleMania for the rub that it's meant to be. There's a non-negligible chance that the crowd would actively rebel against it and crap on it. If they just go straight up with babyface Roman Reigns winning the Rumble and then going over Brock at Mania, try to visualize the traditionally smark-heavy crowd at the Raw after Mania. Followed closely after by the Extreme Rules PPV in Chicago. I think he gets a tepid response at Mania (by Mania standards anyway) and a negative response at the biggest shows that follow.

Basically, if you're WWE you can't just spend the cred built up in Brock however you want to. You need to get it approved by the audience. Otherwise you didn't even successfully do it.

All of that said, I do think that you can maybe get away with putting Rollins over in some flukey way in the triple threat match (NOT BY CASHING IN) tomorrow. Have him capitalize on an opportunity and pin Brock himself without any outside help. Like...Cena hits the AA, Rollins clears Cena out, does his own curb stomp and then gets the win. It's not this totally unbelievable thing where Rollins pinned Brock by himself, because it looks like he needed Cena's finisher to really complete the job (and thus it remains believable in keeping with how Brock and Rollins have been booked respectively), but he still gets a damn pin that nobody else has been able to get. Then he can crow obnoxiously about it while strutting around with the title belt.

The flaw in all of this is that I still just can't see Rollins going on last at WrestleMania. It is a more viable way IMO to have a younger star pin Lesnar and get some of the heat transference done in the proper way, but if you're just going to have him drop the belt again within a month to set someone else up as champion for Mania then there's no point, and if you're putting the title anywhere but last on the Mania card then I will burn the state of Connecticut to the ground.

Well we don't know what Cena is doing yet. If he isn't in the title match then clearly he would go on last.

Cena didn't go on last at last year's Mania. Has also not gone on last on multiple PPVs since.

Feel like if the plan is for Rollins to win at the RR they should have handled his matches differently in the last few months by making him more of a credible threat in the ring instead of just a weasel who steals matches. Even stuff like making Reigns look like he should have beat him in their match hurt. Feels like the Raw before TLC where Rollins put Cena through a table did more to put him over in terms of looking strong than any of his matches lately

I hope we get that AA to curbstomp spot and Brock kicks out

I feel like we could have history come close to repeating itself, only this time Bryan is actually in the rumble, and I don't think the crowd will hate Roman being the winner as much.

I wonder if their will be an unexpected heel turn tomorrow. I really have no reason to guess this could happen, just tossing it out there.

Re-watching the endgame part (from Rey's entrance) in the 2014 Rumble. Honestly I didn't even remember just how much the crowd crapped on the whole thing. That was pretty amazing.

Having seen that, I agree that there's little chance that Philly truly replicates that tomorrow night no matter what WWE does.

Entire post makes a ton of sense, but I'll just snip this part to respond to for sake of brevity. I definitely understand the theory that just because they have this built up credibility doesn't mean they can just use it however they want. For instance you can't just have Jinder come out and beat Brock to stop the one fan from rioting and push him to the moon. What do you do though when the only people the audience will accept don't need it? It seems the audience is just on Bryan or riot at this point.

An interesting side point to me is that a large part of that is the WWE's fault for their poor booking over the past few years. They've spent the last 3 years showing that the current roster is below semi-retired superstars of a decade ago. The Rock came back and beat Cena and then beat Punk twice. He jobbed to Cena who is already at the top. Brock came back and beat Taker, Punk, and then decimated Cena. HHH came back and beat Punk. So now that it's time to cash in on the the fact that Brock is leaving, they find themselves looking around and having nobody to hand this to that doesn't have a lot of downside. It's kind of nice to see the years of complaint about their long term booking of current stars coming to fruition. The fans likely won't accept a Reigns over Brock win. You're right. Especially in Philly tomorrow. Which SHOULDN'T be that big of a deal as they can just audible to a different option that works, but due to this issue there just ISN'T anyone else other than the two mega over people.

I guess if you have faith in Bryan's neck it's not as bad as I initially thought. Especially considering in the worst case scenario of only getting a year out of him you can just transfer that credibility from Brock to the guy that beats Bryan eventually. Plus it does provide the best match possible at Mania, makes the fans hype, and should be a huge moment.

I don't know. I definitely see what you're saying and definitely WANT Bryan, and I don't feel as strongly about it needing to be Roman as I did yesterday.

I do think that the crowd would more readily accept Dolph Ziggler than Roman Reigns if they wanted to go the ultimate underdog route, but Brock is such a damn monster that it's going to be difficult to see anyone besides a big hulk like John Cena or Roman Reigns going over him. That obviously includes Daniel Bryan given the size difference, but they can do it with Bryan since he's already been fully accepted as maybe the best wrestler in existence by the masses...Dolph obviously hasn't.

In a different scenario with a normal-sized champ I could see going the Ziggler route after they let him go over to close out Survivor Series, but I just can't visualize them trying to give the Lesnar rub to him and I'm not even thinking it would really be wise to even though I'm certainly a fan of his.

The more I think about it the more I think Orton has a really good chance to win. Probably because I've been thinking about it so much. Orton is one of the few if not only non-Bryan named wrestlers who could (1) win; (2) get a good crowd reaction; and (3) main event WM31 as a credible opponent to Brock. Also for that SWERVE if he does win.

I'm not buying Orton winning at all. If they go with Orton winning then it probably means that Rollins wins the big title and then we have the ****ing Orton vs. Rollins undercard match for the big belt.

I do not think they're setting up Orton vs. Lesnar at all. When Orton comes back the natural trajectory is for him to feud with someone in the Authority.

If only they had someone really strong they could have built up over the past 8 months like THAT GUY WHO THREW BIG SHOW OVER THE TOP ROPE.

Yup, have to think that could have worked. Bastards.