#4 Alberto Del Rio & Kalisto devalue The US Championship
Throughout 2015, John Cena did what many thought was impossible: he made the U.S. Championship great again.
Every week, he issued an open challenge to anyone brave (or stupid) enough to face him, and it ended up being the match of the night on more or less each occasion. These title defences were the highlight of every show, and Cena managed to show off his wrestling skills like never before.
Finally, after all, these years, Cena managed to silence all those annoying critics, who thought he couldn’t wrestle, and less than four months after he lost the belt, all his work had gone down the drain.
After Cena lost the title to Seth Rollins and then regained it shortly afterwards, the big question was, ‘who will defeat Cena for the U.S. Championship and how?’ This was something that should’ve been given plenty of time and planning, as Cena had proved that he could defeat pretty much anyone.
Unfortunately, they thought, ‘ah screw it, give it to Alberto Del Rio’, which is what we got at Hell in a Cell 2015.
Del Rio defeated Cena in a surprisingly quick match, but there was no follow-up to it. This was supposed to be a big deal: Del Rio had just PINNED JOHN CENA CLEAN, and that result went down in history with no fanfare. Del Rio didn’t even attack Cena to get more boos; he just grabbed the belt and left. Way to make the belt feel important.
As if that wasn’t enough, Del Rio fell into the same holding pattern as he was in, prior to his firing, facing fellow Latino wrestlers with no storyline other than, ‘I’m a better Mexican than you’. This led to Del Rio feuding with Kalisto over the U.S. Championship, which led to some of the most reputation-destroying matches in that title’s history.
The belt changed hands four times between October 2015 and January 2016. Worse, Kalisto defeated Del Rio for the belt on January 11th, 2016 on RAW, and then lost it back to Del Rio the SmackDown immediately afterwards.
To whom does this do any favours? Who benefits from such decisions? No one, not Del Rio, not Kalisto and certainly not the US Championship.
