Mozenrath
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Post by Mozenrath on Jan 27, 2023 1:48:08 GMT -5
Simple enough premise. Let's go back as far as January 1st, 2013. Who is the worst world champion of that time, either in terms of their reign or the premise of them winning the thing in the first place?
WWE (including NXT's world title), AEW, Impact/TNA, ROH, NWA, MLW, NJPW, AJPW, NOAH, etc, anything that can plausibly be dubbed a World Title counts for this. Just no, "Action Agnew, the Southeastern Heritage Farmer's Market Heavyweight Champion of the Tri-State Area", please.
I'm going to tank my own thread by saying that, to me, it's probably Tyrus winning the NWA title. He was a bad choice for TV champion, and he's a worse choice as the guy to have be the face of your entire company. He's a shitty person, an unintimidating monster, and he makes Nia Jax in her last year look like Tiger Mask. He's slow, he's immobile, and he sucks.
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Post by Red Mage Riot on Jan 27, 2023 1:55:21 GMT -5
Close run thing between Jinder Mahal and Tyrus. Not sure who to pick.
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Mozenrath
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Post by Mozenrath on Jan 27, 2023 2:18:00 GMT -5
Close run thing between Jinder Mahal and Tyrus. Not sure who to pick. Tyrus has the "benefit" in that he is in a limited environment in terms of stars, even if he was still probably the worst choice Corgan could make, especially when he KNEW prior to this that people did not want Tyrus. Jinder had the upcoming India tour (which was a reason, albeit not a great one), MUCH younger than Tyrus both now and when getting the belt, and WWE could afford to experiment, but he was poorly built to it and surrounded by guys like Finn, Nakamura, etc, that were better choices. Two bad choices, but I guess some of it will depend on how long Billy sticks with Tyrus. Even Jinder would not have been AS bad if WWE hadn't stuck with him as long as they did. Had it been 2-3 months, it'd have been bad but not too out there. Instead, he held it for like half a year.
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Post by Starshine on Jan 27, 2023 2:27:17 GMT -5
Close run thing between Jinder Mahal and Tyrus. Not sure who to pick. This is probably right. Also wanna add an honorable ( pun intended?) mention to Matt Taven.
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Mozenrath
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Post by Mozenrath on Jan 27, 2023 2:31:01 GMT -5
Close run thing between Jinder Mahal and Tyrus. Not sure who to pick. This is probably right. Also wanna add an honorable ( pun intended?) mention to Matt Taven. Taven's wild in that he was inarguably the choice people wanted less between him and Scurll, but it spared us Marty tainting the title lineage, in retrospect. I also think he was at least less of a buzzkill than if Jay Lethal had won, given how long in the tooth that reign had been by then.
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Post by Red Mage Riot on Jan 27, 2023 2:31:18 GMT -5
Close run thing between Jinder Mahal and Tyrus. Not sure who to pick. This is probably right. Also wanna add an honorable ( pun intended?) mention to Matt Taven. The thing about that is, hindsight has been very kind to Taven, I think, because the only other obvious choice in that era of ROH was Marty Scurrl, who now looks like a massive dodged bullet that he's not on their list of champions.
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Post by Bo Rida on Jan 27, 2023 2:56:28 GMT -5
Jinder. Devalued what should be the top title in the business, ended the litdown era, shit matches and racist promos. All for nothing because he's not Indian so didn't even help that boost that market.
Tyrus is a strange one, he might be crap but I bet more people are aware of who the nwa champion is than at any other point in recent years. Doesn't mean they'll watch though. As far as I'm aware no racist promos.
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Post by Starshine on Jan 27, 2023 3:04:21 GMT -5
This is probably right. Also wanna add an honorable ( pun intended?) mention to Matt Taven. The thing about that is, hindsight has been very kind to Taven, I think, because the only other obvious choice in that era of ROH was Marty Scurrl, who now looks like a massive dodged bullet that he's not on their list of champions. He was television, and six man champion, and the actual booker which means more than anything else, so I don't see what difference his name being attached to another belt really would matter, especially since Elgin's also on it, and no one cares about that now. Also, this shouldn't be an either/or thing between the two guys. They didn't have to put it on Taven like they didn't have to put it on Scurll. It was a bad decision no matter who was in the match.
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Post by ANuclearError on Jan 27, 2023 4:15:03 GMT -5
Sadly, I have to go for EVIL.
You take a popular face brawler in the midcard, and turn them into a constantly cheating heel whose matches are boring long slogs filled with interference during a time when everything is in turbulence.
He's yet to recover from it.
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msc
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Post by msc on Jan 27, 2023 4:39:09 GMT -5
I was going to go for Jinder Mahal (not ready, rubbish matches, dodgy promos, derailed Nakamura) but I had no idea Brodus fn Clay got a World title anywhere!
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Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-]
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Post by Xxcjb01xX [PIECE OF: SH-] on Jan 27, 2023 7:18:21 GMT -5
I know the Tyrus reign kinda makes it look amazing by comparison but the Nick Aldis forever reign as NWA Champ kinda sucked too... he still didn't deserve the treatment he got once he dropped it though, NWA's suffered harder for it since.
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Post by kingoftheindies on Jan 27, 2023 10:53:21 GMT -5
Jinder and Taven stick out. Neither were really ready for the reigns and both ended up being rather boring.
I'd honestly say any ROH title reign outside of Rush, Adam Cole, Kevin Steen, and Cody's reigns were all relatively boring/bad
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Post by Cyno on Jan 27, 2023 12:08:38 GMT -5
Jay Lethal in ROH, Jinder Mahal in WWE, and Tyrus in NWA were all the drizzling shits.
I'd mention Matt Taven in ROH, but in hindsight it was absolutely the right choice.
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Post by Jindrak Mark on Jan 27, 2023 12:44:40 GMT -5
It has to be Jinder.
Smackdown was great from the 2016 draft until post-Wrestlemania 33. You can basically pinpoint it's downfall to when Jinder won the title, similar to Smackdown turning to crap after Wrestlemania 20 when JBL suddenly got pushed.
And they sacrificed Nakamura's big main event babyface push for him. Also, we missed out on dream PPV matches like Cena/Nakamura at Summerslam and Orton/Nakamura at Hell in a Cell. Instead they were both given away on TV as no.1 contender matches. It would be like in 1998 having to beat Austin and Undertaker on free TV for the right to challenge WWF champion Marc Mero at the big PPV. It was so ass backwards.
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Post by Gerard Gerard on Jan 27, 2023 12:49:52 GMT -5
Jinder was a rare example of act hurting a top title rather than being elevated by it. Granted, I’d attribute a lot of that to the presentation, especially that they actively booked him as a midcard champ who just happened to hold the top belt, but still, he did the title no favours.
Tyrus, quite rightly, doesn’t even register as it’s not like NWA acting matters anymore between the pandemic and Corgan actively booking against whatever success it did manage.
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coleslaw
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Post by coleslaw on Jan 27, 2023 13:48:34 GMT -5
Jinder & Tyrus are obvious, but I'm gonna go a different route: almost any part-time World champion in WWE
Having Goldberg smash Kevin Owens & Bray Wyatt purely to setup Wrestlemania matches was stupid. Having Rock win the WWE title for an arbitrary 2 month title run, when a triple threat main event at Mania would have worked perfectly fine was stupid, IMO. Brock is borderline. He's had a ton of great matches and moments, but there's also stuff like going over Braun when he was arguably at his hottest and squashing Kofi for a f***ing Cain Velasquez match.
There's been worse champions, sure. But I think it's worth mentioning.
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Post by The Ichi on Jan 27, 2023 13:58:21 GMT -5
I've not seen Tyrus in NWA, but if it's true that his ring work has somehow REGRESSED from his indy/WWE days, then he gets the benefit of the doubt of being the worst.
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Post by XIII on Jan 27, 2023 14:02:24 GMT -5
Jinder solely because I don’t consider the NWA as a viable world title. Tyrus = Melonhead and the Infinite Badness.
Got to feel bad for Jinder though as it wasn’t his fault that they didn’t build him up and instead just put it on him because they were trying to expand into India and they thought that they needed someone that looked like the Indian people. Never mind all of the things wrong with that line of thought.
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chazraps
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Post by chazraps on Jan 27, 2023 14:08:08 GMT -5
To defend a few that have been mentioned:
Jinder at least we got him beating the #AllLivesMatter out of Orton in his hometown of St Louis. We also got generations of fans finally having representation at the top of the card - if it made that many people feel good I can't bring myself to call it the "worst" of anything. Plus, I'll say the first two months of it was a great looking repackaging with a banger theme and sweet entrance.
Matt Taven seemed to just be missing whatever it was on television that made him connect so much with live audiences. If you revisit his 2018-2019 work, he wins the entire crowd by the final bell (each time except the MSG match) and I think a fair amount of the hate he gets is that he was the face of ROH's least-interesting worst booked era where the entire show revolved around Bully Ray.
Jay Lethal's reigns were both marred by their endings that didn't do justice to the rest of the reigns. Plenty of times there seemed the perfect moment in either reigns to end both but the trigger wasn't pulled. Especially the 2019-2019 one. Man, f*** Bully Ray. That said, the first reign had a tremendous amount of great defenses, and the second one at least had the historic feeling of Lethal hitting 1,000 Days as Champion. Both times they really missed the boat having a great moment of Colt Cabana winning the ROH title in Chicago (At Global Wars in 2016 and All In in 2018, the latter was changed to Flip Gordon for one of the worst aging angles of the 2010s)
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H-Virus
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Post by H-Virus on Jan 27, 2023 14:10:00 GMT -5
Gotta give it to Jinder; 1, because I never saw RoH or NWA to know how bad their champions really were, and 2, because it’s f***ing Jinder Mahal! The guy probably had less than ten televised victories under his belt at the time, he was white bread boring in the ring, not much better on the mic, all of his matches played out and ended the exact same way, even the WWE themselves had to admit what a weak champ he was when they realized he would have to have a Survivor Series match with Brock Lesnar and pivoted hard towards AJ Styles instead and, despite his own assurance that he wasn’t just some experiment to draw in the Indian audience, he completely vanished from the main event scene the second the title was off of him and they didn’t have ten million new network subscriptions from India to show for it. So in the end, his six month long title reign was a complete waste of time.
Also he ruined my enjoyment of Smackdown in a time when it was the only wrestling show that I was invested in, which is a good enough reason on its own to call him the worst.
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