WWE Raw: Where Does This All Leave Bray Wyatt?

Bray Wyatt is likely to wind up without a tag team partner due to the questions surrounding Matt Hardy’s in-ring career. Despite his relatively quiet year, it wasn’t too long ago that the Eater of Worlds was among the most compelling characters in the company but is it too late for Wyatt’s stock to rise once again?

Bray Wyatt has long been at the forefront of the conversation for wrestlers who could believably exist as The Undertaker of this current generation. Wyatt and The Undertaker were both charismatic cult leaders who could strike fear into their opponents through the frequent use of mind games.

Wyatt’s road to being a main event fixture had its ups and downs. Any time he was being built up as a serious threat, frequent big-match losses to the likes of John Cena and Roman Reigns sent his momentum back down to earth. His momentum would be built back up more often than not at the expense of wrestlers like Dean Ambrose and Daniel Bryan who needed a big win just as much as him. Rinse and repeat.

After getting drafted to SmackDown in 2016, Wyatt slowly started to return to prominence thanks to a new Wyatt Family—including Luke Harper and newly villainous Randy Orton—that became one of SmackDown’s most intriguing stories. This resurgence for Wyatt led him to his first WWE Championship at Elimination Chamber in 2017. However, the overall joy of Wyatt finally reaching his apex was short-lived.

Wyatt went on to lose the WWE Championship after just 46 days to Randy Orton who—despite burning down the Wyatt Family compound which was home to Sister Abigail’s grave—was portrayed as the hero. With his momentum back in the toilet, he was transferred over to Raw in the 2017 Superstar Shakeup.

Following an awkward feud with Finn Balor—which featured Wyatt’s cringeworthy portrayal of Sister Abigail—ended without a blowoff, the former Wyatt Family leader being warring with “Woken” Matt Hardy. Hardy and Wyatt engaged in a series of matches with each other that led to The Ultimate Deletion which Hardy won and Wyatt ended up in the Lake of Reincarnation.

What was initially thought to have been the catalyst for a complete repackage of Wyatt’s character wound up resulting in Wyatt and Hardy becoming a tag team as The Deleters of Worlds. The pinnacle of The Deleters of Worlds’ brief tenure as a duo was highlighted by them capturing the Raw Tag Team Titles at the Greatest Royal Rumble. Sadly, with the transfer of Raw’s top tag teams to SmackDown, The Deleters of Worlds were at the top of an incredibly thin tag team division.

Left with few credible teams to feud with, the duo lost the Raw Tag Team Titles—as well as crowd support—rather unceremoniously to The B-Team at Extreme Rules. Around this time, rumors began swirling about Hardy’s possible retirement and Hardy himself confirmed that he is starting to work as a road agent for the company. The main question is where does this all leave Bray Wyatt?

Wyatt has been through multiple start-and-stop pushes and even his long-awaited WWE Championship reign turned out to be ill-fated. Bray Wyatt is one of WWE’s most layered personas in years hence why it would be a tragedy to see the character fizzle out with a whimper. Wyatt’s character has the potential to work again but it will take a commitment to maintaining him as a credible threat among the top names in the company to get fans re-invested.