Analyzing WWE’s List of Potential WrestleMania 33 Matches

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WWE.com

John Cena vs. Samoa Joe

Having won the WWE Championship from AJ Styles to tie the record for sixteen world championship reigns, John Cena is once again perched on top of the WWE mountain as “The Champ”, and with Randy Orton as the 2017 Royal Rumble winner, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done between now and April for this bout to be set up.

Priority number one obviously would be for Samoa Joe to make the move to SmackDown Live. A lot of people were hoping to see the “Samoan Submission Specialist” make his presence felt on Sunday night, but those hopes didn’t come to fruition until he instead made his debut on Raw, so as of this very moment, this match may be the least likely to happen out of everything on this list.

That being said, and this is a big maybe, but once Samoa Joe finishes up his feud with Seth Rollins heading into Fastlane, Joe might make the switch to team blue. After all, there is going to be a lot of ground to cover between both Raw and SmackDown’s final pre-WrestleMania pay-per-views and the event itself.

So much ground, in fact, that the brands will have a whole lot of time on their hands to properly execute the build for each of its divisions’ matches in Orlando.

Now, we probably shouldn’t expect Samoa Joe to earn a WWE Championship match in his debut WrestleMania, but if John Cena happens to drop the title at Elimination Chamber, it could be a strong indicator that this match will happen.

There is a lot of history between John Cena and Samoa Joe, who trained and competed together in Ultimate Pro Wrestling in the early 2000s. The WWE began exploring that affiliation between the two not that long ago, and it could make for quite the poetic WrestleMania match for the two to square off all these years later.

Again, until we actually see Samoa Joe set foot in a SmackDown Live ring, this match will remain a distant possibility. But there’s really no way of telling what to expect from Cena at WrestleMania until we get into the heart of the build, so it’s not impossible to think these two men’s paths will finally cross paths again.