When Bobby Lashley debuted on the WWE Raw after WrestleMania, fans were hoping for the “Dominator” to become one of the company’s biggest stars. However, it wasn’t until he started a feud with Roman Reigns when he finally started to seem like more than just another guy.
WWE dropped the ball hard on Bobby Lashley during his feud with Sami Zayn, as the program included an offensive segment and an underwhelming blow-off at Money in the Bank. After defeating Zayn with ease, Lashley set his eyes on WWE’s biggest prize, the Universal Championship, only to find that Roman Reigns still isn’t over Brock Lesnar.
Reigns lost to Lesnar at WrestleMania 34 and The Greatest Royal Rumble, but he has a legitimate reason to still be after that Universal Championship. Lashley, meanwhile, sees things differently, believing that Reigns has had chance after chance to capture the title, coming up short each and every time.
The two have been playing mindgames with each other for weeks, and they finally started colliding on the Raw go-home show before Extreme Rules this Sunday. Once again, WWE decided to go the route of having the locker room pulling apart two big, determined babyfaces gunning for a title. This heightened the drama, and, for the first time, fans started to care a little bit about Lashley.
Say what you want about Reigns, but every time someone gets put in a program with him, they come out of it looking better. We saw that with Braun Strowman last year, and The Miz and the Intercontinental Championship both benefited greatly from their time with Reigns. Throw Jinder Mahal in there, too, as he rebounded nicely from his post-WWE Championship blues by feuding with Reigns at Money in the Bank.
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This goes for Lashley, who finally has momentum. At Extreme Rules, he will likely main event a Pay Per View for the first time in his second stint with WWE, whereas he partook in a “bathroom break” match at MITB. On the Raw before Extreme Rules, Lashley opened the show as part of a hot angle, whereas he was previously in a dead-in-the-water rivalry with Zayn that was essentially a weekly embarrassment. Obstacle course, anyone?
Furthermore, Lashley has a chance at gunning after the Universal Championship at SummerSlam. We know that Brock Lesnar will defend the title at the second-biggest Pay Per View of the year, regardless of how many times WWE tries to divert our attention to their little smoke-and-mirrors “lazy, part-timer” act that they’ve (shrewdly) heaped onto Brock.
There’s a 90% chance (Scott Steiner helped me do the math here, so you know it’s as legit as Sasha Banks’s hair dye) that Reigns wins this unofficial No. 1 Contender match for the Universal Championship against Lashley. But what about the 10% chance that Lashley wins? There had been rumblings earlier this year of a Lashley vs. Lesnar showdown at SummerSlam pitting two legitimate fighters and prolific wrestlers against each other.
WWE has shown that they aren’t afraid of putting Reigns in main events in the face of hostile crowds, namely at Backlash against Samoa Joe, but maybe they’re interested in doing something just a little bit different at SummerSlam this year. It seems unlikely, but it isn’t exactly as hard to foresee as Reigns’s initial loss to Lesnar this year at ‘Mania.
Outcome aside, the fact remains that Lashley is in a much better position here in July than he was just a few weeks ago in June when Money in the Bank took place. A lot of that goes to this program with Reigns, which has been simple and allows both performers to speak for themselves. Working with Reigns is an opportunity to boost your stock without much effort, and Lashley has benefited greatly.
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It doesn’t hurt that Reigns usually has good matches, particularly against wrestlers of Lashley’s athletic caliber. That bodes well for both of these men at Extreme Rules, especially if they are tasked with main eventing a show that includes Dolph Ziggler vs. Seth Rollins in an Ironman Match and Rusev vs. AJ Styles for the WWE Championship.