1,000 days of the WWE Universal Championship: 3 positives and 4 negatives

#6 Positive: The title elevated Kevin Owens

WWE made the best of a bad situation following Finn Balor’s injury at SummerSlam 2016, with Kevin Owens stepping up from the mid-card to win the vacant Universal Championship in a Fatal 4-Way match on Raw against Big Cass, Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins.

Owens went on to main-event three of the next four Raw-exclusive pay-per-views, retaining his title against Rollins at Clash of Champions and Reigns at Roadblock: End of the Line before he was defeated by Goldberg at Fastlane.

Throughout that time, he formed an alliance with Chris Jericho (Team Chris & Kevin, aka Team Kevin & Chris) which turned out to be one of the most entertaining parts of WWE programming between SummerSlam 2016 and WrestleMania 33.

The end of Owens’ tenure as champion against Goldberg left a lot to be desired (more on that shortly), but his 188-day reign will go down as one of the greatest spells of his WWE career.