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The 411 Wrestling Year-End Awards: Part Eleven – The Most Overrated Performers of 2017: Mahal, Orton, Suzuki, More
Image Credit: WWE
Welcome back to the Wrestling Top 5, year-end awards edition! What we are going to is take a topic, and all the writers here on 411 will have the ability to give us their Top 5 on said topic, and the end, based on where all of these topics rank on people’s list, we will create an overall Top 5 list. It looks a little like this…
1st – 5
2nd – 4
3rd – 3
4th – 2
5th – 1
It’s similar to how we do the WOTW voting. At the end we tally the scores and get our overall top 5! It’s highly non-official and final, like WWE’s old power rankings. From some of the best and worst, the 411 staff is ready to break down the awards! Thanks for joining us, and lets get down to work.
(The wrestler who gets the biggest push, despite lacking ring ability or charisma needed for their position.)
5. Ember Moon
4. Kane
3. Bray Wyatt
2. Jinder Mahal
1. Randy Orton – Randy Orton is generally accepted as a top guy of his generation and often cited by his colleagues as one of the best in ring workers of his generation. In 2017, WWE rewarded these factors with a Royal Rumble victory, a world title victory at WrestleMania, and high profile feuds with Bray Wyatt and Jinder Mahal. The trouble is, for every big opportunity Orton got this year, he absolutely did not deliver. Sure, some responsibility goes to WWE’s creative team and to Orton’s opponents. Still, for a guy with Orton’s reputation, he won a totally forgettable Rumble, and none of his PPV matches as or challenging for the WWE Championship cracked two stars. Orton was, at best, the more polished performer in rotten matches.
5. The New Day
4. Curtis Axel/Bo Dallas
3. Jinder Mahal
2. Matt Hardy
1. James Ellsworthless – Might as well explain my choices here before ripping ol’ Jamesy Boy a new one. The New Day I…I mean, come on! Aren’t we all done with them yet? My brother in law would be yelling at me for ending a sentence with the word ‘yet,’ but I don’t care. I am still waiting for somebody to tell me why they are handing out pancakes. Curtis Axel and Bo Dallas. Bo has hope. He has a chance to do something. Curtis…sorry bud. No mania running wild here. Jinder Mahal is actually not ‘over rated’ in the sense that most would assume. In order to be over rated, somebody would have to rate him highly in the first place. Well, sadly, somebody behind the scenes did and made him WWE Champion weeks after losing to Mojo Rawley and Finn Balor in two minutes. Matt Hardy is fine in a tag team with his brother Jeff. Legendary tandem and sure fire WWE Hall of Fame inductee. As the WOKEN/BROKEN dude chopping his teeth, talking to fish, and visiting zoos, meh. I didn’t get it last year and still don’t in 2017. Soon to be 2018. The one lone bright spot to all of this is that Jeff Hardy can finally return to a solo act in the main event scene where HE belongs. That brings us to Mr. James Ellsworthless. Honestly, everything I said about Matt Hardy can just be repeated. I don’t get it. I never did. Even when he had his ‘amazing’ debut against Braun Strowman, I completely stayed stoned face. Never even blinked twice. Just the usual local bum getting crushed. Then I moved on to the next segment. Suddenly, everybody online i talking about his great performance. Chris Jericho is putting in a good word for him. People are clamoring for him to be signed (which miraculously served him a one year deal). It was ridiculous. Carmella is a million times better without him. The women’s division is FINALLY on track after his exit. AJ Styles losing to the clown was a joke. He dragged Dean Ambrose down from main eventer to the Kickoff Show at WrestleMania 33 in a matter of months. All around goof. Not many kind of comedy at all and was mercifully ended after a year. A year we will never get back. At least we can always look back on the first ever Women’s Money in the Bank ladder match and see that embarrassment win. Ugh! Please stay far away from Philadelphia on January 28th…
5. Natalya
4. Jinder Mahal
3. Hirooki Goto
2. Shinsuke Nakamura
1. Randy Orton – People like Hirooki Goto, Shinsuke Nakamura and Will Ospreay (who nearly made my top five) are all talented wrestlers, who have under performed in the past year. Randy Orton falls into that category. When he wants to, Orton can be among the best in the world. He didn’t want to in 2017. He gave next to no effort on most nights. I think the only matches of his I enjoyed were against Luke Harper, Nakamura and AJ Styles. Other than that, he was involved in two of the worst feuds of the year (Bray Wyatt and Jinder Mahal) and had some absolutely trash matches. He was totally overrated and over pushed in 2017.
5. Cody Rhodes
4. Shinsuke Nakamura
3. Brock Lesnar
2. Jinder Mahal
1. Dean Ambrose – Given the unending amount of vitriol I’ve had for Mahal’s “experimental run” as WWE Champion, some readers may seem surprised that I wouldn’t pick him as most overrated. Yes, his main event run was an abject failure in my mind for a multitude of reasons, among them lack of cultural awareness and proper on-screen buildup, but at the very least he made the effort to improve himself to the point upper management in WWE took notice and saw what they thought to be a lucrative opportunity by putting the strap on him. That being said, one can hardly say Dean Ambrose improved or made any sort of upward tick in terms of his attitude or in-ring acumen, and fell into a rather goofy malaise for the better part of 2017, relying more on his “Lunatic Fringe” moniker and wacky backstage hijinks than the natural charisma he cultivated as Moxley in the indies and during his Shield years. You could say that the reunion with Rollins brought a little of that unpredictable spark we saw in his original role with The Shield, but it didn’t really amount to a whole lot before he went down with a serious triceps tear that will put him on the shelf up until mid-2018. In that time, hopefully, Dean can reflect on his lull throughout 2017 and rediscover what made him the truly crazed, no-nonsense madman we came to enjoy in his fledgling years with WWE.
5. Eli Drake
4. Shane Strickland/Killshot
3. Sami Callihan
2. Cody Rhodes
1. Kane – The idea that Kane was ever anything more than mediocre is an idea that I resent. And listen, I’m a supporter of bad wrestlers when it works. The first 2 years of Braun Strowman’s career were mostly memorable for him getting lariated to the shadow realm by Brock Lesnar and just generally being terrible. He was basically Gene Snitsky, down to the hilariously awesome theme music. But he improved. Drastically. Kane has been an active detriment to the WWE product for at least a decade when he’s put in a serious role. He does not and will never have the in-ring ability to convince me for a single second that he’s a “monster.” The only time he’s ever looked anything but generic in the ring is when he was in there with guys like Chris Benoit and Shawn Michaels… and those matches were 15 years ago and ultimately amounted to nothing more than overlong RAW main events. But that’s not what this award is about; it’s about the atrocious booking team and their hard-on for Kane’s seniority. I can only imagine that’s what it is at this point, because there are multiple big men under their roof that are better than Kane ever was. WWE’s insistence that he be put on the same plane as the aforementioned Strowman? It’s been to the detriment of a wrestler in Strowman that WWE has otherwise done a fabulous job of building. The one wrestler WWE has actually managed to not screw up, they put him with a chubby 50 year old Kane who’s far more a benefit to the political landscape in Tennessee than he is wrestling. Kane’s sudden booking as a monster heel (of which he has not been since the similarly awful Authority tie-ins) not only compromised the already hampered Shield reunion, but it also completely destroyed an over babyface in Finn Balor. So not only is this man just overrated in general, but everyone’s nostalgia trip over him has again resulted in harming the current product, which needs as much help right now as it can possibly get.
5. The Young Bucks
4. Kevin Owens
3. Minoru Suzuki
2. Adam Cole
1. AJ Styles – Look, clearly everyone likes AJ Styles – I love AJ Styles. He’s had an awesome career, and is still having good matches. But let’s be real, this is 2017. There was so much amazing wrestling going on in the world, we’re talking like weekly “5-star matches” and none of them are coming from the WWE. So to be constantly hearing AJ Styles declared as “the best wrestler in the world”, it’s just gotta be the most overrated thing of 2017. Can you be the best wrestler in the world by having “kind of” good matches every couple of months against a string of competent wrestlers? What are we even talking about here? You’re going to seriously watch Zack Sabre Jr vs. Chuck Taylor and say AJ Styles had a better match this year? Or Ishii vs. Naito, Riddle vs. Walter, Rush vs. La Park? And I’m not even pulling out the big guns here. There’s no doubt AJ was going to be capable of having good matches with guys like Jinder Mahal, Finn Balor and Brock Lesnar, but if he’s the “best wrestler in the world” shouldn’t he be having the “best matches of the year” against those guys? Are we rewarding him for overachieving in a stunningly mediocre WWE? That’s incredibly naive and quite frankly ignorant at a time in history when it’s easier than ever to be informed of, and watch, a variety of wrestling from all over the world. AJ Styles is a great wrestler, and one of the few bright spots left in the WWE, but please let’s not continue overrating him into 2018 with the false moniker of “best in the world”.
5. Eli Drake
4. Sami Callihan
3. Randy Orton
2. Minoru Suzuki
1. Jinder Mahal – There are times when I find this to be a very difficult category to pick, and the 2-5 spots were tough, but #1 was easy this year. But I will say this before I really get into things, I have nothing but respect for the work Jinder Mahal put in to make it back to WWE. He was released, became depressed, drank too much and barely was booked and when he was, he looked like shit. But he made it back, got into the shape of his life, and got the chance of a lifetime to be WWE champion. I can respect all of that, but unfortunately none of that turned him into a good wrestler, and none of that made him a good WWE champion. He never felt like a world champion, there was no build for it, it never took off, it did nothing in a positive financial note for the company, and his in ring work overall was… average at best. Yes he had some good outings with AJ Styles, but that is because it was matches with AJ Styles. Jinder is a good redemption story, but just wasn’t ready to be pushed to the very top.
5. Shinsuke Nakamura – 6 points
T-3. Kane – 7 points
T-3. Minoru Suzuki – 7 points
2. Randy Orton – 13 points
1. Jinder Mahal – 18 points
THE 2017 411 WRESTLING AWARDS:
* 1. The Biggest Disappointment of The Year: >Katsuyori Shibata’s Injury & Retirement – 14points
* 2. The Best Non-Wrestler: Dario Cueto – 17points
* 3. The Best Tag Team of The Year: The Usos – 31points
* 4. The Worst Major Shows/PPV of 2017: WWE Battleground 2017 – 16points
* 5. The Best Female Wrestler of 2017: Asuka – 24points
* 6. The Best PPV/Major Show of 2017: NJPW Wrestlekingdom 11 – 11points
* 7. The Best Promotion of 2017: New Japan Pro Wrestling – 35points
* 8. The Most Outstanding Performer of 2017: Lucha Underground – 29points
* 9. The Best Weekly TV Show of 2017: Kazuchika Okada – 18points
* 10. The Best Matches of 2017: Tyler Bate vs. Pete Dunne (NXT Takeover: Chicago) – 19points
