Chris Jericho Has Message For Roman Reigns Haters, Talks Fan

"But all I know is that Roman Reigns was everybody's favorite guy until the Royal Rumble."

This just enforces my dislike for Jericho.

Jericho has gotten really weird over the years...and no, Ambrose was my guy going into the Royal Rumble.

In some parts he's got a point but in others he doesn't.

Why is it that anyone who defends Regins has to bring up Bryan. Ziggler Ambrose and Sandow all got a positive reaction and they came out after Bryan was long gone.

One thing is for sure... Roman Reigns was not getting booed before the Royal Rumble, so that says something. No matter what you say the "turn" on Roman Reigns was weird and didn't make sense. Hell the guy was never booed before the Rumble and booed heavily on his entrance... When he hasn't even won the match yet. No one and I mean no one( "not named WWE") knew for a fact that he was going to win. Something else could have happened and someone else could have won but the guy would still get booed on that day. And Why? Why? There is no logical explanation.



Yes they did.... But so did Roman Reigns the year before. If Roman Reigns last year was only cheered because he was not Batista then it's safe to say too that Ambrose, Mizdow, Ziggler and even Rusev only got cheered this year because they were not Roman Reigns.

In Rusev's case yes. He was literally only cheered because he wasn't Roman Reigns. In 2014, Roman didn't just get cheered because he wasn't Batista. It was because, at the time, he was still cool. Ambrose, Mizdow and Ziggler got cheered at the Rumble because they are super popular. Hell, Ambrose, Ziggler and Bryan get the biggest pops in the company each week.

I think something that has turned some away from Roman Reigns is his lack of character development. Take my girlfriend for example. She's about as casual a viewer as you can come by. She used to really like the Shield. Since they split, she likes Seth and Dean more because they have their own personality. She doesn't like Roman really anymore because in her eyes, he just looks like a guy stuck in the Shield past, with no personality that makes him enjoyable.

That may not be the case with everyone obviously, I can only base it on one casual viewer.

Roman was definitely cheered at the end of the 2014 Rumble largely because he was not Batista. The lesser of two evils. It wasn't nearly as full on as the Rusev situation but the hate in 2014 was piled on Batista at the time and Roman directly benefited from that heat. Maybe WWE misinterpreted that situation and saw Roman as a guy the people loved in that moment, I don't know. I don't remember too many people actually wanting Roman Reigns to be the guy to win the Rumble and head to Mania against Orton though.

I like that you use you girlfriend as a barometer for the casual viewer. My wife watches Total Divas and then Raw here and there with me and her opinion really helps ground me with stuff I'm completely narrow minded about. Conversely, there is stuff I enjoy and she'll be like "that's embarrassing, why are you watching that right now..." haha. I like having that perspective in my life. I also agree with your girlfriend in that Reigns hasn't had any character development. I know we've talked about this before, but WWE strapped the entire Shield gimmick to Reigns when the Shield was over and dead. It's part of the problem.

Jericho is one of my all-time favorites, but I don't always agree with him. This is an instance where I understand where he's coming from, and agree with what he's saying to a certain extent, but not entirely. To me, Reigns has always been a guy that you knew could be a star, and his reactions were conducive to that. He wasn't there yet, though. I think a lot of his positive reaction stemmed from being part of the Shield, then, once they broke up, it was a lot of good placement. The audiences were noticeably bored with Randy Orton last year, especially during the summer. Put Reigns in a feud with him, he gets cheered. Seth Rollins was establishing himself as the best heel in the business, put Reigns in there with him, he gets cheered. Then you have the crowd entrance thing, which is going to momentarily get anybody over. People get excited when they can see a guy up close from a seat that normally wouldn't allow it. It's cheap pandering, but it works.

Reigns was getting popular, but WWE (and apparently, Jericho) drastically overestimated where he was at on the "popularity scale", so to speak. He'd won over the easier segment of the audience - the women and children, but he'd failed entirely to connect with the core male audience. You can't fault Reigns for that, WWE has done him absolutely no favors since the Shield split, aside from booking him against guys that would produce a strong (but ultimately hollow) reaction for him.

It's cool to see punksnotdead and The Kevstaaa mention using their girlfriends as sort of casual barometers. I try to do that with my friends as well, especially during Wrestlemania season. My best friend used to hate wrestling, couldn't understand why I watched it, etc. In college, when we lived together, he kind of started getting into it a little bit. He's a casual fan now at best, who usually tunes in around Wrestlemania season. I try to feed him as little information as possible so as to be sure his opinion is left largely untouched by my, admittedly jaded perspective being a longtime and active member of this community. We got to talking about the Road to Wrestlemania last week and he told me how little he's enjoyed what he's seen. I asked him why, specifically, and he said that it was blatantly obvious, even to him, that WWE was forcing a guy who wasn't "there" yet. The first thing he said was "what the hell happened to Roman Reigns?" When I asked what he meant, he told me how cool he thought The Shield was and how much he could get behind all of them (he particularly likes Dean Ambrose.) But, since they split, he views Rollins and Ambrose as individual personalities and sees Reigns as a desperate caricature of himself. Almost as if the only thing stopping Reigns from becoming completely irrelevant is the fact that he kept facets of the Shield that people really liked.

I also presented the overall story arc of the last year to another close friend of mine, who is immensely fascinated by film, television, and writing cohesive stories. As an avid comic reader, I like to think he can decently pick out the good and the bad stories in pro wrestling. He knows next to nothing about wrestling. He recognizes names and faces, and has watched shows in the past, but is, by no means, a fan. I presented him the Daniel Bryan/Authority/Roman Reigns arc over the last year and half as objectively as possible, and simply said, "knowing what you know, how do you book Wrestlemania?" I asked him to do it in a way that would satisfy the story he'd been presented with if he were the viewer. Without hesitation, he said, "Daniel Bryan vs. Brock Lesnar, and Triple H vs. Roman Reigns."