The 411 Wrestling Top 5: The Top 5 Worst Feuds of 2016 (So Far)

The 411 Wrestling Top 5: Hello everyone and welcome to 411 Wrestling’s Top 5 List. We take a topic each week and all the writers here on 411 wrestling will have the ability to participate and give us their Top 5 on said topic. So, onto this week’s topic…

Week 348 – The Top 5 Worst Feuds of 2016 (So Far)

What have been the worst feuds of 2016 so far?

Kevin Pantoja
5. Adam Cole vs. Jay Lethal – This was a hard list to come up with and I probably ended up leaving something out. Anyway, I start with the Jay Lethal/Adam Cole program. At the end of Global Wars in May, Adam Cole joined the Bullet Club and they took over the show, producing an ending so abysmal that I stopped watching Ring of Honor consistently. Admittedly, I didn’t see a lot of the feud because of that, but from what I read, it was very under whelming. Cole shaved Lethal’s head and eventually took the ROH Title from him. I have to include this for being the program that killed my interest in ROH. Now it looks like they are going to drag out Cole’s reign and wait too long to give the title to Kyle O’Reilly. Yay.

4. Roman Reigns vs. Triple H – There was potential here. Looking back to 2014, the eventual Triple H/Roman Reigns feud should have been great. However, like almost everything else in Roman Reigns’ career, it was horribly mishandled. Reigns beat up HHH near the end of 2015. HHH returned and took the WWE Title from him by winning the Royal Rumble. Then they started the awful build to WrestleMania. Reigns got taken out and missed time. He came back and acted like the heel, somehow managing to turn Triple H into a sympathetic babyface at times. Then, it all seemed to culminate in an overly long, boring WrestleMania main event.

3. The Guerillas of Destiny vs. Great Bash Heel – A lot of the booking in New Japan Pro Wrestling has been the target of negative words by me. I don’t like it. It gets overlooked because the shows and performers almost always deliver top notch work in the ring. Unfortunately, neither came together here. Great Bash Heel consists of Togi Makabe and Tomoaki Honma, while the Guerillas of Destiny is the brother duo of Tama Tonga and Tonga Roa, Haku’s kids. They had two matches on major NJPW shows and were both arguably the weakest matches on the cards. The crowd didn’t seem to care much despite GBH being very popular. GOD took the titles and swept the matches before having more dull outings and dropping the titles to the Briscoes.

2. Charlotte vs. Natalya – This was all kinds of terrible. First off, the WWE made the horrible decision to put the brand new Women’s Title on Charlotte. They touted it starting a new era, yet we got more shit finishes and bad promos from Charlotte. The crowd badly wanted Becky Lynch or Sasha Banks. Following Mania, they instead put the lifetime personality vacuum, Natalya in there. Her and Charlotte have the combined charisma of a doorknob. Now, they had some good matches at TakeOver in 2014 and at Roadblock earlier this year. This feud had none of that. Two shitty matches with shitty finishes, including a poorly redone Montreal screwjob and Dana Brooke cosplaying as Ric Flair. Just 100% garbage.

1. Titus O’Neil vs. Darren Young – At least with Charlotte/Natalya, people hated Charlotte. This rivalry has no heat on the heel and nobody cares about the babyface. Darren Young and Titus O’Neil keep getting split despite only being interesting when teaming up as the Prime Time Players. Bob Backlund is the only entertaining thing about all of this. These two just keep having boring, bad matches on Raw week in and week out, with nobody going anywhere. The only people gaining anything are the fans catching up on their sleep. Seriously, what is the point of these matches? Who is getting the push? Why should anyone care?

Greg DeMarco
5. Roman Reigns vs. Rusev – There is SO MUCH potential for these two in this feud, both legit badasses who can entertain simply by throwing down. But instead it’s about Roman’s apparent infatuation with Rusev’s wedding plans, so much so that it made the face the heel and the heel the face. As for Lana? She’s been criminally wasted for so long, it’s about time we reveal that she’s actually an American spy or something.

4. Baron Corbin vs. Dolph Ziggler – Ah, the feud that basically became a mockery of itself. This thing had less direction than a member of the Colon family being booked by Vince McMahon, and it showed. Need proof? Look no further than the current spot on the card for both men.

3. The New Day vs. The League Of Nations – No explanation needed.

2. Dean Ambrose vs. Dolph Ziggler – Look, Dolph Ziggler is an amazing talent—despite appearing on this list twice—and him winning the SummerSlam opportunity for Smackdown was a great development. But it kinda fell apart from there. Ziggler’s motivation was never concrete, and the WWE just didn’t give us what we needed—which was a competitive rivalry. Seems obvious now that it was a placeholder for AJ Styles vs. Dean Ambrose, and Ziggler is right back to the midcard where he apparently belongs.

1. Shane McMahon vs. The Undertaker – Shane’s return was fantastic. Him feuding with his family was fantastic. But the extension towards The Undertaker didn’t fully work. And I thought it would, too. But it didn’t. The Undertaker was used by Vince, and that was never addressed. If he took a “the Devil made me do it” approach, I could have bought it a little more. But looking back, it just didn’t make sense.

Arnold Furious
5. Great Bash Heel vs. Tama Tonga & Tanga Loa – This series of matches for NJPW managed to kill the popularity of Tama Tonga dead. He was an up and comer in the midcard who had just started to connect with the Japanese crowds. And then they paired him up with Camacho. He stank in WWE so they got rid of him. He stank in TNA so they got rid of him and now he’s stunk up New Japan so badly that his own brother is no longer over in the slightest. Their tag title run was so bad that they were rapidly moved on as champions, dropping the belts after one hideous title defence. Tama just barely recovered his popularity during a run in the G1. Tanga Loa is absolutely dead and he’s actually caused damage to the reputation of the Bullet Club by being in it, a group that contains Yujiro Takahashi.

4. Kendo Kashin vs. Antonio Honda – DDT is a promotion that prides itself on comedy wrestling. Honda is one of the funniest comedy guys in the entire company. Kendo Kashin doesn’t seem to grasp comedy quite as firmly. Kashin even won the Extreme title in DDT and defended it in laborious fashion with equally unfunny outings against Super Sasadango Machine and in a tag. Kashin managed to be the least interesting wrestler on a show that LEONA, Tatsumi Fujinami’s useless son, wrestled on. Quite the achievement.

3. Jimmy Havoc vs. The Revolutionists – Rev Pro had a pretty hot angle at the end of 2015 where Jimmy Havoc got into a feud with upstart punk Josh Bodom. That in turn created discord within Bodom’s group The Revolutionists until they solidified against Havoc, someone the more senior members (Sha Samuels and Marty Scurll) considered a friend. Havoc then recruited T-Bone and Bram as back up and they had a six man tag, which was terrible and then Havoc hurt his knee and the whole thing was dropped. It was interesting, then bland, then gone in about three months. More embarrassing is perhaps the blow-off match here being even worse than the blow-off match in the Will Ospreay vs. Vader feud, which featured a 61 year old, virtually immobile Mastodon going over the companies brightest talent. Rev Pro has had it’s fair share of highs in 2016 but this wasn’t one of them. The Revolutionists never recovered and their run petered out.

2. Shane McMahon vs. The Undertaker – The whole entire point of this feud was that if Shane won he could control RAW but if he lost he was shit outta luck and out of the WWE. So what happens? Shane loses and then runs RAW for months followed by SmackDown Live. We still have no idea what precious secrets were contained in Shane’s mysterious locked box. What’s perhaps worse than the nonsensical storyline WWE presented was the interaction between Shane, a notorious pussy with no real fighting skills, and the Undertaker, a man who fancies himself an MMA expert and was last seen going toe to toe with the Beast himself Brock Lesnar. Naturally the match was 50-50 mat grappling nonsense for 20 minutes, with the smaller more awkward Shane on a par with the Dead Man, before Shane fell off something tall. At least Vince never allowed himself to be portrayed as a total badass. He always knew better than to be anything other than a joke when facing his superstars in legitimate matches. Shane needs to learn from his old man.

1. NOAH vs. Suzuki-gun – This feud has been going on for an eternity (since January 2015 but it feels a lot longer). Ever since Suzuki-gun rolled into NOAH it’s been the focal point of the promotion and it’s made one of my all-time favorite companies virtually impossible to watch with any consistency. The matches dominate all the big shows, there’s no escaping the angle and there’s no safe haven outside of the juniors and even that division has been dominated by Taichi for a big chunk of the year. Unlike everything else on this list this feud is responsible, completely, for ruining an entire promotion for two years and counting. At least with other feuds in other promotions the focus hasn’t always been on that feud, this has been all encompassing. There’s no escape.

YOUR TURN KNOW IT ALLS

List your Top Five for this week’s topic in the comment section using the following format:

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