John Cena is the franchise in WWE. The squeaky clean superstar is the man who makes little kids’ dreams come true, literally. Call him Mr. Make a Wish in that respect.
Adult fans are as bored with him as the 10-and-unders are enamored, and that’s been the case for several years. Want to know why Bray Wyatt is getting massive pop from live crowds and the Internet these days? Because he’s in a program with John Cena.
Strange how this is all working out, isn’t it? Your top face is the guy that you use not to make your top heels, but to build your next top face.
The John Cena character is stale. That is undeniable. But is WWE simply unable to turn him heel as a means to try to shake things up with Cena and thus with the top of the card?
Probably so.
Daniel Bryan’s hot run is already cooling off now that his chase for the WWE strap has come to an end. The prospect of a second straight pay-per-view main event with Kane (Kane!) looms for Bryan, which tells us that creative has absolutely nothing in the tank for its champ. So much for the Yes! Movement.
Roman Reigns is not quite ready for prime time, his clean fall of Batista in the six-man at Extreme Rules notwithstanding.
After Bryan and Reigns, who else is there for the company to build around as the top face?
The sound you hear as we contemplate this resembles crickets chirping. Nobody knows; there’s simply nobody on the horizon.
Plenty of good performers, but nobody to build a company around.
And so we’re stuck with John Cena being the top face. God love the guy, but his in-ring work is limited, his act on the mic is so, so tired and uninspired.
A heel run, which is inevitable, at some point, though maybe years from now, will spice things up for John Cena, much like the heel turn of Hulk Hogan in the mid-1990s with the nWo added so much to his character with a new direction.
It’s incumbent upon WWE creative to build up its next generation of top guys as soon as possible. WIth John Cena stale, that means the product overall is stale. The return of Batista didn’t move the needle. Triple H reforming Evolution with Randy Orton and Batista barely registered a blip on the radar. The Daniel Bryan-Kane series is a snoozer that we might see a few more times for lack of anything better.
But that all said, John Cena is not turning heel. They just can’t do that right now.
– Column by Chris Graham
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