Ryback

By Scott Keith on August 13, 2014

I was watching some WWE from 2012, and was blown away at how over Ryback was. I
remember the mainstream media(who usually never do stories on WWE unless it is
some scandal or controversy) writing pieces on what a rising star Ryback was
at the time.
This week on RAW, he is a loser in a 2-on-1 handicap match. The guy seems
stuck in heel JTTS mode. But this time 2 years ago he looked to be WWE's
hottest new talent. All those jobs to Old Man Henry didn't help. But
basically, how do you screw something like this up? This time in 2012 you
would have put money on Ryback being a Main Eventer today(granted he's never
going to be Hogan or Austin level over, but still). Instead he doesn't even
have a spot on the SummerSlam card, and is simply "muscular midcard heel who
always loses the big match".
What are your thoughts on this? Is this the biggest case of WWE totally
dropping the ball in recent years? WWE gave Batista and Kane main event runs
this year, but Ryback wasn't even on the WrestleMania or SummerSlam cards, and
loses handicap matches to fucking Sheamus.

I don't think anyone is particularly losing sleep over the fate of Ryback, but it was definitely a dropped ball on their part. Clearly the endgame was driving a dump truck of money up to Goldberg's house and having him come in and squash Ryback to end the character, and given how many DVDs that Goldberg has sold they probably could have justified it. Really though, once they booked themselves into the corner with the Punk title shot, there was no going back. They were unwilling to pull the trigger on him at that level and just kept downgrading him with each loss. It turned into a classic self-fulfilling prophecy, where they'd book him to lose and he'd lose heat as a result, and then they could justify moving him down because he wasn't as over. The Mark Henry thing REALLY killed him off, of course. I dunno, I guess mostly it's just classic Vince where he gets fascinated with a concept for a while and then gets bored of it and moves on.

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