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Daily DDT EOY Series: What was WWE’s Biggest Mistake?

By Rob Wolkenbrod

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From December 23 through January 2, Daily DDT will be bringing you our “End of the Year” series of posts, which will highlight the biggest topics in professional wrestling from 2014.

In each post, some of our writers will be giving their reaction to these subjects.

In this post, we will look WWE’s biggest mistake of the year. There’s many candidates for this, so here we go.

By now, you know that WWE is known for their controversial booking decisions. From Brock Lesnar ending The Undertaker’s streak at WrestleMania, to breaking up The Wyatt Family, to breaking up The Shield, and even giving Lesnar the WWE World Heavyweight Championship. However, their biggest mistake this year was destroying Cesaro’s momentum.

Earlier this year, we profiled the rise and fall of The Swiss Superman.

"Wrestlemania 30 made it look like the rest of 2014 would be the year of (Antonio) Cesaro.He was on a quick ascension up the WWE ladder as every crowd cheered him on as a baby-face. His wrestling skills are fantastic and got over with the crowd well. They really loved the “Cesaro Swing” even more. Every time he did that during the match, it got the crowd going and resulted in them all being in awe of Cesaro’s strength."

Cesaro was, indeed, extremely entertaining to watch wrestle. He’s arguably the best wrestler in WWE and when he’s had an opportunity this year, he’s made the most of it.

Unfortunately, the rise of Cesaro did not last for long.

"“I’m a Paul Heyman guy.” That one sentence looked like the greatest thing in the world for Cesaro’s career. It turned out to be the nail in the coffin that nobody realized that night.The assumption was that Heyman was now a face since it looked like Cesaro was turning face. It just didn’t make sense with Heyman managing Brock Lesnar the night before and ending The Undertaker’s 21-0 streak at Wrestlemania. How could he be a face after that?"

WWE eventually pulled the plug on the Paul Heyman-Cesaro alliance by saying it was a “mutual decision.” They had another segment together on Raw sometime after that, which led to some speculation that the former Ring of Honor star could be involved in a program with Brock Lesnar. That, of course, didn’t happen and likely will never happen.

After this, Cesaro hung around the mid-card for most of the summer. He would end up putting on a great match with Sheamus at Night of Champions for the United States Championship, but would go onto lose. WWE seemed to be realizing that they have something in this guy, until they made him lose a 2 out of 3 falls match to Dolph Ziggler at Hell in a Cell by getting swept. Since when does a match like that ever not go 3 falls?

After doing some jobbing, it appears that WWE aligned him with another misused Superstar: Tyson Kidd. Both of them deserve higher spots on the card, but WWE doesn’t seem to think they can “click with the audience.”

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Where this tag team goes is a mystery. They’ll likely hang around on Main Event and Superstars. Will they ever get anywhere? Probably not.

WWE missed their chance on capitalizing on Cesaro’s momentum. By keeping him as a heel, they killed his popularity with the fans and sent him into the basement of the card.

Hopefully 2015 will be better for The Swiss Superman.

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