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Post by cabbageboy on Aug 5, 2018 14:07:52 GMT -5
Yeah for all the dubious nature of Cena's initial push and him going over people he probably should have at that point....at least he was going over people. At least I understood that they were trying to make this guy the #1 man in the business. With Reigns I don't even understand what it is that they are trying to do. It's sort of like the guy's push has flopped miserably but since WWE is the only game in town they just keep force feeding him, and it keeps failing, and also he keeps failing. Summerslam is absolutely the sink or swim for this guy. If he doesn't decimate Lesnar then there's zero hope left for him. I don't mean "Brock slips on a banana peel and gets hit with a spear" either. I mean he needs to just stomp Lesnar in 2 minutes and send him back to UFC.
Having someone being hyped as The Guy but really isn't The Guy is seriously nihilistic. As in does anything matter?
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 5, 2018 14:44:55 GMT -5
Like, they really thought Reigns keeping everything from the Shield is really gonna be what pushes him to the top. Like, they had Reigns keep the Shield gear, entrance, music and that's not everything.
The Shield were called the Hounds of Justice. Roman's called The Big Dog. The Shield said it was their yard. Roman says it's his yard. The Shield's strategy was winning by numbers. Roman's slogan is "one versus all."
He's literally all of that in one guy. I don't even know 1 thing original about Roman whether it's his lineage, his moves, his character, promos, just all of that is so manufactured.
It's an anomaly when you think about it. I knew he took things from that group but it's deeper than I figured.
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Post by Natural Born Farmer on Aug 5, 2018 14:56:57 GMT -5
As aggravating as the all Cena, all the time booking was, he still had pretty fantastic rivalries with Edge and Punk, couple great matches with Umaga, he even carried Great Khali to a halfway decent contest. Certain amount of rose tint in looking back and realizing what we've lost by not having Cena as THE guy anymore, but I don't think anyone is going to look back on Roman's booking in five or ten years and say "you know what, that was pretty good!"
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Unocal 76
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Post by Unocal 76 on Aug 5, 2018 15:10:39 GMT -5
Did people leave their seats during a Cena match?
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EyeofTyr
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Post by EyeofTyr on Aug 5, 2018 15:26:08 GMT -5
Did people leave their seats during a Cena match? Actually according to some reports from the very early days of his push, yes. Infamously there were reports of people leaving during the Angle/Cena saga. Though I'm not sure, as it's been so long, if they were ever confirmed or disproved.
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Post by Old Jack Burton on Aug 5, 2018 16:02:40 GMT -5
Cena's by miles and miles. They actually put the belt on Cena and let him be a fighting champion for over a year. They have never actually put their faith in Roman for all his super pushes.
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Post by "Gizzark" Mike Wronglevenay on Aug 5, 2018 16:03:50 GMT -5
However, within six months to a year of their main event runs, Roman barely evolved in the ring and is now about as good as Cena was in 2006/2007 but across that year Cena went from a guy who could turn it on in a PPV main event to one of the greatest to ever do it within a few years. Cena got 2 watchable matches out of Khali. He pulled better matches out of Khali than HBK, Triple H, and Taker ever could. Yes. In PPV main events. He was still often the five moves of doom on weekly TV though until London or so I would say.
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Post by CMPunkyBrewster on Aug 5, 2018 16:22:31 GMT -5
Simply put, Cena is, was, and always will be better than Reigns in every facet of professional wrestling, and it's not even close.
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Fade
Patti Mayonnaise
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Post by Fade on Aug 5, 2018 16:34:43 GMT -5
Absolutely yo.
What helps is Cena was self-aware and rolled with the reaction with his humility and wit.
Big Dawg ain't got none of that lol
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Post by GuyOfOwnage on Aug 5, 2018 16:35:07 GMT -5
I'm not entirely sure what the measurement is here, but I'll look at it from an in-ring standpoint. I think it's safe to say both guys went through some pretty bad growing pains during the initial stages of their respective superpushes.
Like, Cena's great in the ring now, but he was pretty awful in-ring during his first World title reign. Angle, Jericho, and Christian were wrestling circles around him, and it was frankly embarrassing. Likewise, Roman initially looked so lost out on there on his own immediately post-Shield.
And whether people want to admit it or not, Roman has improved significantly, and I say that as someone who hasn't exactly been enamored with his god-like push these past 4 years. I feel like he'll eventually come into his own, just like Cena did. I guess what confuses me more than anything else, though, is why they don't wait a little longer for these guys to come into their own instead of seeing the tiniest glimmer of potential and strapping the rocket to them. That's my main issue with the way both guys were pushed.
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Post by Deleted on Aug 5, 2018 16:36:08 GMT -5
Cena. There is zero comparison to even be made.
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Post by blissified on Aug 5, 2018 16:44:11 GMT -5
That's like choosing to walk on a bed of nails or broken glass.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Aug 5, 2018 16:45:22 GMT -5
Cena got 2 watchable matches out of Khali. He pulled better matches out of Khali than HBK, Triple H, and Taker ever could. Yes. In PPV main events. He was still often the five moves of doom on weekly TV though until London or so I would say. I think that's three more moves than Roman knows.
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Post by Cyno on Aug 5, 2018 17:17:51 GMT -5
I still think the criticism of Cena for the five moves of doom was really odd. That's just textbook babyface booking.
And yeah, it sure as hell beats Roman spamming Superman punches.
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EyeofTyr
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Strange and Mystical
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Post by EyeofTyr on Aug 5, 2018 17:30:14 GMT -5
I still think the criticism of Cena for the five moves of doom was really odd. That's just textbook babyface booking. And yeah, it sure as hell beats Roman spamming Superman punches. I can't speak for everyone, but I think in a lot of ways it was born out of two issues with early Cena matches when he was a main event talent. The first is that this was coming off of the era of Austin and Rock as the top babyfaces, and while they had their signatures and their finishers, you didn't always see all of them in every single match. A lot of times Austin and Rock would both wrestle a match better suited to whomever they were up against rather than a strictly speaking "Austin Match" or "Rock Match" in the same way the formula for a Ric Flair Match developed and formulas like that. That's not to say it never happened either, but it was more wisely structured in general. Whereas Cena upon making it to the main event had a lot of moves he had been known for suddenly vanish from his moveset, and in general his moveset seemed to boil down to just those five moves. I recall a lot of his TV matches of that time spamming those five moves again and again, and again with nothing between them, usually in the same order. Not unlike how Roman does now. There was no variety. Worse yet, there was no variety when there had been and fans knew he could. So I think the problem was less Cena had his five moves of doom and more at the time it was pretty much all he had, and even more frustrating for any long time fan they knew he was capable of more, and in comparison to the top babyfaces prior to him he felt limited and stifling.
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Post by TWERKIN' MAGGLE on Aug 5, 2018 17:50:32 GMT -5
At least Cena could back up the push he received.
Roman lost that the second his lazy ass walked out of the Rumble so he could take a nap.
He's unsuited for his role and never will be suited for it. The most undeserving top guy ever, including promoters' sons.
Roman is bad and always will be.
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Post by Starshine on Aug 5, 2018 18:03:44 GMT -5
Cena's extended pushes was the thing that stopped me watching the shows weekly. Imagining going through it again sounds awful. But, oh my god, it's still much better than any of this Reigns shit. Like with Cena even if you disliked how they kept him bottlenecking the top of the cards, at least you could easily justify why it was happening, and what benefits were coming out from it. The Roman Reigns experiment just seems like an endless cycle of insanity where the end goals aren't even concretely clear. There's only so much that you can fast track against the tides if the end result is simply just business as usual. Straight up none of it makes any sense. The guy gets booed to all hell every year at Mania, and we go through the same cat and dog show to get us to that exact same spot again. It's absurd.
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Johnny B. Decent
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Post by Johnny B. Decent on Aug 5, 2018 18:10:11 GMT -5
The only person Reigns is better then as Vince's preferred guy is Tom McGee.
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Post by ThankGodForSidJustice on Aug 5, 2018 18:20:36 GMT -5
I guess in that only 50% of the fans hated him while about 80% hare Reigns. I do think that Reigns is more talented in ring then Cena was in the peak years of his super push (2005-2010). I just don't get why it's so hard for them to have a top face that everyone likes.
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Post by 1 Free Moon-Down with Burger on Aug 5, 2018 18:47:31 GMT -5
But I don’t think the issue is that at all. Even at the height of “SPOILER: Cena wins,” there was never this heavy a feeling of him being hammered down the throats of the viewers like there has been with Roman. People are rejecting Reigns because of how many times the WWE is going back to this well. I don't agree with this. In more recent years Cena's relationship with fans has been more healthy and a lot of the boos seem to be more playful but fans were pretty frustrated with him during his peak years in a similar fashion to Roman Reigns now. I think a big part of why Roman is having such a hard time right now is because we had been through this with Cena and people don't want shitty top babyfaces anymore. In the thick of it, they'd been doing similar things with Cena, like simmering down Christian's push because it's getting in John's way. They pummelled us with endless feuds like the one with Edge where they were literally cutting promos on each other saying how this is the greatest feud since Austin/Rock. They sacrificed storyline integrity to keep Cena strong, like with Bray Wyatt and Nexus, and even Brock Lesnar in the early goings of his second run. They had Kurt Angle say he doesn't like black people and wants to tap out Jesus Christ just to try and get him some boos over Cena and that was in the early stages of the whole thing. The Kurt Angle black people thing was a joke by Angle saying that he could do anything and still get cheered. And the Edge/Cena being compared to Austin/Rock wasn’t done until their last match against eachother which was like 4 years after their first feud and an argument could be made that their rivalry was the best since Austin/Rock.
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