wrestling / Columns

WWE Champion AJ Styles: Why Are We Mad?

October 10, 2018 | Posted by Steve Cook
AJ Styles WWE Smackdown Image Credit: WWE

It wasn’t so long ago that Brock Lesnar was the absentee WWE Universal Champion. Most wrestling fan opinion I read on websites & social media told me that it was terrible. He was never around. When he was, he typically loafed his way through suplex-filled matches. Paul Heyman had to do the talking for him, and there was rarely anything new to say. People wanted an active champion. Somebody that was around all the time, had championship-level matches & generally cared to represent his brand as champion.

SmackDown’s had one of those for over three hundred & thirty days now.

AJ Styles WWE Super Show-Down

AJ Styles displays pretty much all of the qualities one would expect of a heavyweight champion. Once upon a time he would have been lacking in the size department, but that doesn’t matter so much in 2018. For most of his career he was dismal on the microphone, but he’s grown into somebody that comes across as believable. When he says that SmackDown is the house that he built, or that Samoa Joe’s going to pay for messing with the Styles Family, we believe him. And of course, his work in the ring is second to none and his reliability to be wherever WWE wants him to be goes without saying.

So why are people down on his reign as WWE Champion?

AJ covers most of the things that Brock Lesnar lacked. He’s certainly an upgrade from the man he unseated as champion, one Mr. Jinder Mahal. Since winning the championship on November 7, 2017, AJ has done nothing but be an upstanding champion, taking on whoever WWE puts him against. No matter what those opponents bring, Styles finds a way to come out on top & retain his championship. Sure, he’s been disqualified on a couple of occasions, but that’s due to his opponents trying his patience until he couldn’t take it anymore.

I’ll tell you the main thing I don’t like about AJ’s reign. He wrestles the same people all the time. How many title matches did Shinsuke Nakamura get after he lost at WrestleMania? Way too many. There was a time where somebody would lose a title match and be forced to get to the back of the line. Especially when they weren’t a perennial champion. Nakamura lost fair & square at WM, but decided to hit a low blow after the match. Then we got multiple rematches afterwards, presumably because Styles was mad somebody hit him in the junk. I’m not sure that’s the best way to determine who gets a title shot. Theoretically, I could sneak into the ring after an AJ Styles match in Cincinnati. hit him in the balls, and get many title matches. This would not be a great idea on multiple levels, but it was how SmackDown’s writing team decided to reward title matches.

Styles & Nakamura had a great match at the Tokyo Dome. They haven’t recreated that magic since. I don’t blame WWE for thinking they would, because we all thought they would. We tend to assume that if two people have a great match, they’re like Ric Flair & Ricky Steamboat and can constantly have great matches wherever and whenever. Sometimes, two people can have a perfect moment where they meet & create magic, and never be able to re-create it. That was the fate of Styles vs. Nakamura. I don’t blame WWE for going there. I do blame them for going there over and over again. Once they decided that Nakamura could only be the low-blow guy, there was no reason for him to keep getting title shots. Nobody in the world believed in Nakamura getting the title after WM, but they kept going there.

As much as Styles vs. Nakamura should be an IWC wet dream, it’s less so when we know the result. Once Shinsuke lost at WM, he had no chance unless Vince fell in love with his heel act. He didn’t, at least until Nakamura got down to the US title level and we could have Nakamerica or whatever the hell they’re pushing right now. We know how much WWE loves pushing foreign heel acts at the US title level.

Once Styles got past Nakamura, he ran into Samoa Joe. Another IWC favorite. We at least knew that Styles & Joe couldn’t have bad matches, and we were proved right on that one. They’ve wrestled against each other for ages in different promotions. Maybe they didn’t get the five snowflakes that Joe got with CM Punk in singles matches, but I feel pretty safe in saying that nobody knows AJ Styles & Samoa Joe in the ring better than AJ Styles, Samoa Joe & Christopher Daniels. The only way Styles vs. Joe matches can be made better is by adding Daniels. Since WWE didn’t see fit to sign Daniels and give him WWE Championship opportunities right away, they stuck with Styles vs. Joe. And as we suspected, they had great matches every time out there.

The only flaw? Maybe Joe could have won at some point. But then again, Joe was trying to break up AJ Styles’ family. If somebody was trying to break up my theoretical family, I would have been unstoppable in the process of not letting that happen. AJ Styles, obviously being a family man with family values, wouldn’t have let that happen either. Once Joe crossed that line, he had no real chance of getting out of the feud with the title.

So AJ won in Australia. And I saw people whining & moaning on Twitter. My good friend & yours from back in the day Chris Lansdell had the following observation:

The danger in long title runs is that you have to keep escalating the odds the champion faces, which leads to the champ looking more and more superhuman. We’re there with AJ. He needs to drop.

I love Chris, but it seems like a diplomatic way of saying “GODDAMN IT AJ DROP THE STRAP ALREADY”. So many people out there have this same opinion. AJ’s had the title for oh so long so it’s time to drop it. They don’t care who would get it, they just want to see that title change hands for the sake of it. Then once that happens, they would complain about whoever had the strap, and how they would pale in comparison to AJ Styles.

You know that’s exactly what would happen. Just like any other group of people, Internet wrestling fans are never happy unless they’re complaining about something. Even when everything is going their way, the internet fans need something to whine about. Just like the Republicans complaining about life in America even when they have control of the Presidency, Congress & Supreme Court. At some point you would think they would realize that maybe they’re the problem, but naaaaaaahhhhh. There’s got to be somebody else to blame somehow. But there really isn’t.

The one complaint about AJ’s title run I have? There haven’t been enough different challengers. Using the Internet Wrestling Database as reference, here’s who he’s defended the WWE Championship against over the past 300 days.

Jinder Mahal
Kevin Owens
Sami Zayn
Baron Corbin
Dolph Ziggler
John Cena
Shinsuke Nakamura
Rusev
Samoa Joe

To be honest, that list is kind of deceiving. Owens & Zayn never got a title shot without the other individual involved. Corbin, Ziggler & Cena only got a shot as part of a Six-Pack match along with Owens & Zayn. The only people that got singles matches were Mahal, Nakamura, Rusev & Joe. As somebody that grew up on Bret Hart giving title matches to everybody under the sun, along with the Attitude Era giving us different title matches every week, this doesn’t look great.

But that isn’t AJ’s fault. That’s WWE’s fault for not putting enough compelling challengers on SmackDown. That’s the SmackDown booking team’s fault for not helping enough people become compelling challengers, or even bothering to book the matches. It’s not like people thought Papa Shango or Virgil could become WWF Champion. Bret did the matches anyway, and they worked for what they were. If you’re going to have somebody be a champion for a long time, you should have plenty of things for them to do.

I suppose this is another part of the problem. SmackDown doesn’t seem like a priority to WWE most of the time. It’s where they send things they don’t really want to deal with. My assumption is the main reason AJ has had the title this long is the fact that they don’t feel like dealing with it. Theoretically, SmackDown fans should be happy with AJ having great matches every so often. Right? It’s not bad in theory.

Eventually, they’ll come up with something else. Maybe they’ll find some young guy in Saudi Arabia to push. Or Russia. Or maybe there’s somebody else already waiting in the wings. Eventually WWE will find their guy. That guy will end Styles’ lengthy reign as WWE Champion. The Internet will be excited for a minute…

Then they’ll bitch & moan that Styles isn’t the champion anymore.

Be careful what you wish for.

article topics :

AJ Styles, WWE, Steve Cook