The Magnificent Seven: The Top 7 Post-Attitude Era Years In WWE Programming

WWE has had its hot periods. While not all of the Attitude Era has aged well, it’s hard to argue against the bulk of 2000 offering great television and great PPV (if, admittedly, not a great WrestleMania). Or if Attitude wasn’t your cup of tea, there was the Rock ‘N’ Wrestling and the original Hulkamania years that may not have been so remarkable from a work rate perspective, but connected with the audience and facilitated WWF’s national explosion.

The years in WWE since the Attitude Era tend to get a lot of flack. They’re dismissed for John Cena getting over-pushed, part-timers getting featured too prominently over current full-time talent, over-reliance on lukewarm heel authority figures, the volume of guys who ride the mid-card treadmill for years–if not decades—trading wins without making progress, the more recent woes around Roman Reigns, etc.

It may be a stretch to call the more contemporary product better than some of WWE’s most celebrated times, but it also wouldn’t be fair to call it all bad, or lump all of these years together. This week’s column looks at seven of WWE’s best years since the Attitude Era wrapped up (using the arbitrary, but largely accepted end date of the close of WrestleMania 17). This countdown considered PPV quality, television quality, top storylines, general enjoyability of the product, and, of course, my personal opinion.

#7. 2004

2004 was a watershed year for WWE. The Attitude Era had decisively passed, Steve Austin had retired, The Rock was edging away from part-time status toward his seven-year-plus absence from the WWE ring, the original Goldberg experiment was coming to a close, and The Next Thing Brock Lesnar walked from WWE. The next generation of top stars was falling into place, but guys like John Cena, Randy Orton, Batista, and Edge wouldn’t graduate to true headliner status until the following year.

All of this might have been a recipe for disaster, but it did also open a window of opportunity. 2004 was the year when Chris Benoit reigned as World Heavyweight Champion for nearly half the year before doing the honors for Orton (who Mick Foley helped position as a main event threat). Eddie Guerrero carried the WWE Championship into WrestleMania and retained it until summer. Shawn Michaels did nicely, playing a tweener face character to help get Benoit over on top, while Kurt Angle put in some of his finest work, having graduated from his comedic beginnings to playing a more serious heel.

Sure, 2004 had its lowlights. As much as JBL overachieved in his sudden promotion to the main event, he nonetheless wasn’t exactly an inspired world champ. Triple H returning to the top by fall felt like beating a dead horse, and, after a fun start, Eugene got way over-exposed. Still, it’s a year that had its moments, and one it’s a year we’d probably remember more fondly were it not for the baggage that comes with remembering Chris Benoit now.

#6. 2009

2009 kicked off with Jeff Hardy as reigning World Heavyweight Champion and Randy Orton playing the edgiest version of his villainous main event character, including punting Vince McMahon in the head leading into the Royal Rumble. It was thus a year with a lot of intrigue and potential, parts of which would pay off more than others.

The year wound up particularly interesting for its tag team stories. The Unified Tag Team Championship picture took a sharp turn when Chris Jericho and Edge won the titles. It’s an angle that might have been derailed when Edge got hurt, only to give way to The Big Show filling his spot for a wildly entertaining run alongside Y2J as the veterans fended off a range of full-time tag teams and make shift star pairs alike. Meanwhile, Cody Rhodes and Ted Dibiase looked like they might be on the verge of huge things when they worked a compelling back and forth feud, holding their own against DX. These roads converged with DX ultimately unseating JeriShow in a fun TLC match at the last PPV of the year.

For better or for worse, 2009 was also the year of John Cena vs. Randy Orton—a pairing on Raw that produced a number of borderline great matches, but also stretched interminably long, losing the patience of just about any regular WWE viewer. On SmackDown, though, CM Punk started to find his footing with a heel turn, an entertaining program with Jeff Hardy, and a second, more meaningful world title reign. On the tail end of the year, we got the first Bragging Rights show—a fun, if clunkily executed concept. Batista had an overdue and impassioned heel turn. In the end, Survivor Series may have been the most telling event of all. For the main event picture, in particular, this one might have felt like a place holder with both world champions retaining their titles in stand-alone Triple Threat Matches that weren’t a part of all that meaningful storylines. In the process, however, The Undertaker vs. The Big Show vs. Chris Jericho, and all the more so John Cena fending off Triple H and Shawn Michaels were a lot of fun, and some of the best title matches of the year. Cap all of this with an all time great WrestleMania match between Michaels and The Undertaker, and you have a year that was far from perfect but nonetheless also had more than its share of moments.

#5. 2015

2015 didn’t start out looking like a winner. Vince McMahon seemed to be dragging fans kicking and screaming into the Roman Empire, as Reigns won a much-maligned Royal Rumble match en route his first WrestleMania main event with a presumptive outcome of him slaying Brock Lesnar to formally assume his throne as the new face of the company. A brief detour to Fastlane, with Reigns defending his title shot against Daniel Bryan, didn’t much improve matters as it was a paint by numbers match that only confirmed Reigns’s trajectory.

WrestleMania 31 marked a turning point for WWE’s whole year, though. The show, in and of itself, wasn’t necessarily all that great in a vacuum, but the overwhelming majority of matches on the card outperformed expectations, including a fun car crash of an Intercontinental Championship Ladder Match, an all-time great nostalgia trip as a gang war between DX and the nWo played out as a backdrop to Sting vs. Triple H, a fun crossover celebrity spot featuring The Rock and Ronda Rousey opposite The Authority, and a main event match between Lesnar and Reigns that was quite good in its own right, topped with the historic first ever Money in the Bank cash-in during a WrestleMania main event match, as Seth Rollins proved the optimal solution to get the title off of Lesnar, without having Reigns booed out of the stadium.

With Rollins at the helm, WWE was largely off to the races with a fresh, young, top-shelf worker as the center of programming. 2015 also saw a barnburner of a summer-into-autumn feud between The Undertaker and Lesnar, the beginnings of the so-called Women’s Revolution, and some fun oddball events like Beast in the East and the King of the Ring tournament as WWE experimented with the still-new Network platform. The year also had a nice symmetry about it, with the feel-good closing moment—as ephemeral as it may have been—of Roman Reigns beating Sheamus for the his second WWE Championship, and finally appearing to actually win the approval of the crowd.

I vacillated on how to consider NXT for the purposes of this countdown, but decided that it couldn’t be ignored altogether. So it is that I bumped 2015 up a spot or two higher than I expect I otherwise would have, for stellar NXT stories like Kevin Owens vs. Sami Zayn and Bayley vs. Sasha Banks.

#4. 2012

2012 was defined by returning megastars. It was the year when The Rock worked the WrestleMania main event match, and the year Brock Lesnar came back from MMA, the two of them offering John Cena more interesting rivalries than we could otherwise expect for him, and helping to solidify his place as an all-time megastar in his own right.

2012 also saw CM Punk spend the entire year as WWE Champion, and while he wasn’t as hot as he’d been in the summer of 2011, he nonetheless delivered as one of the better in-ring champions of his era, and arguably the best on the mic, including a particularly heated program with Chris Jericho. Even more so than, Punk, though, one could argue that Daniel Bryan was the best full-time star WWE had in 2012, moving from a fun first world title reign (forgiving the abrupt end of it at WrestleMania 28) to a forgotten excellent series of matches with CM Punk, to the launch of Team Hell No—the tag team that probably should have marked a demotion for for him, and yet became the vehicle that he’d ride to greater notoriety on the way to a truer main event run in 2013.

Factor in very good Royal Rumble and Money in the Bank matches, and The Shield making its auspicious in-ring debut at the last PPV of the year, and you have a year that, while far from perfect, nonetheless delivered quite often.

#3. 2011

For better or for worse, 2011 was a year when unlikely main eventers took flight. First there was The Miz, who cashed in his Money in the Bank contract in late 2010 to come into the year as WWE Champion, and even carried the strap into WrestleMania. While history hasn’t been kind to that run, 2011 also saw CM Punk, on the cusp of not re-signing with WWE, absolutely catch fire in the summer with his Pipebomb promo and MOTYC with John Cena at the Money in the Bank PPV. Then there was Mark Henry, finally making good on a decade of potential, unleashing his Hall of Pain gimmick and running roughshod over the World Heavyweight Championship scene, including a wildly satisfying dissection of Randy Orton.

2011 would see Punk culminate his run by having Howard Finkel serve as his personal ring announcer, en route to beating Alberto Del Rio for the WWE Championship at Survivor Series in Madison Square Garden. It would see the feel-good moment of Christian defeating Alberto Del Rio in a Ladder Match to finally win a world title in WWE (add him to the list of unlikely main event stars), and the unique spectacle of Cena and Del Rio battling in a deconstructed ring after Mark Henry had superplexed The Big Show on it at Vengeance. And there’s the aforementioned Money in the Bank PPV, with its classic main event to cao an all-time classic show—I would argue the best main roster PPV WWE has put on since the Attitude Era. I’d suggest that Triple H taking over as a face authority figure on Raw—feeling genuinely fresh in that role—was a cherry on top.

What holds 2011 back from a higher spot? The Miz did hold a world title for nearly five months of the year, Randy Orton ended Christian’s first World Heavyweight Championshp reign way too soon, and the WWE version of the Summer of Punk got waylaid by Kevin Nash and Triple H getting too involved at SummerSlam and thereafter. Stil, the good outweighs the bad to get 2011 to the top three.

#2. 2002

2002 was the first full year removed from the Attitude Era, and also the first full year removed from the InVasion angle. Both of these points are important for WWE still, in many ways riding a hot streak, while also having emerged from one of the most bungled angles ever to nonetheless benefit from one of the deepest rosters of all time, including not just the original influx of WCW talent, but also guys who had either held out to collect their WCW money, or whom WWE hadn’t previously come to terms with, including Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan and the New World Order, and Rey Mysterio. Chris Jericho was getting his first opportunity as a world champion. Triple H returned in January from the better part of a year on the shelf. Shawn Michaels returned from his first retirement without missing a step. All that, and Steve Austin had turned back face, The Rock was a regular presence, and Brock Lesnar would debut shortly after WrestleMania. To say that that the WWE was stacked at this time is a massive understatement.

With so much talent, WWE launched the original brand split. While the company understandably got some flack for keeping a number of top stars arbitrarily apart, and execution of the split was certainly clunky at times, the spirit of it was good, affording more guys more opportunities at featured spots. The SmackDown Six, in particular, rose to prominence, with Kurt Angle, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Rey Mysterio, Edge, and Chavo Guerrero working magic with one another in a variety of permutations.

Unfortunately, Steve Austin was in a bad place and would end up walking from the company before the year was half over. Meanwhile, the tag team scene, particularly on Raw, stagnated and after the initial rush of Triple H turning heel on HBK, he fell into bad habits as the lead heel, telegraphing the boredom he’d engender all across 2003. These factors held 2002 back from quite taking the top spot in the countdown, though I can certainly understand arguments in the year’s favor.

#1. 2008

I’ll openly concede that 2008 is an oddball pick to top this countdown. It wasn’t necessarily a high profile great year, and yet as I started compiling this countdown, it’s a year that made quite a case for itself.

First and foremost were the year’s two great rivalries. Shawn Michaels vs. Chris Jericho spun out Michaels’ other excellent, shorter 2008 programs with Ric Flair and Batista, and went from a face vs. face disagreement to a full blown blood feud, with Michaels the face against Jericho the heel, ultimately competing over the World Heavweight Championship in a classic ladder match. Meanwhile, The Undertaker and Edge had that rare rivalry to stretch over half of a year, spanning a variety of gimmick matches, without ever losing the interest of fans. Few and far betweens are the matchups to main event both WrestleMania and SummerSlam, let alone break four stars each time (besides good work, including a stellar TLC match in between) but this was exactly that feud with Edge reaching peak form as conniving, cowardly heel and The Undertaker arguably doing the best face work of his career.

Other highlights of 2008 included a gem of a Royal Rumble, highlighted by John Cena’s surprise return; the Ric Flair retirement angle and his WrestleMania 24 classic with Michaels; and the electric moment of CM Punk cashing in his first Money in the Bank contract. No, it wasn’t a perfect year by any stretch, with the luster coming off of Cena’s comeback before long, Randy Orton not particularly inspired as WWE Champion, and ECW being nothing if not uneven. Nonetheless, it’s a year for which the great easily outweighs the bad in my book, to earn the top spot in the countdown.

Which years you add to the list? 2014, for a strong WrestleMania, the spectacle of Brock Lesnar squashing John Cena, The Shield vs. Evolution program, and an all-time great Survivor Series main event was my nearest miss. Let us know what you think in the comments.