WWE Royal Rumble: Ranking Every Winner After Lynch, Rollins Wins

Credit: WWE.com

21. Randy Orton (2017)

This one was a bit of a headscratcher, quite frankly. The 2017 Royal Rumble didn’t have an obvious winner, which would traditionally be cause for excitement. With Brock Lesnar, The Undertaker, and Goldberg all advertised competitors, the field felt wide open. In reality, however, the match fell flat. All three were among the last five entrants, and cumulatively spent only around 15 minutes in the match.

Meanwhile, eventual winner Randy Orton entered the match at Number 23, and ultimately didn’t play much of a role for most of the match. To their credit, WWE seemed to realize that very few people were particularly interested in another Randy Orton Royal Rumble win and seemed to plan accordingly. After the clock ran down on the No. 30 entrant, the Alamodome erupted into a torrent of booing as Roman Reigns made his way to the ring. 

The situation worsened when Reigns eliminated The Undertaker, as the audience began to fear that they were being subjected to yet another chapter in WWE’s never-ending quest to push Roman to the top. Ultimately, this proved to be an expert bit of crowd manipulation, as Orton scored his only elimination of the match, tossing Roman Reigns to rapturous applause from an audience who would have cheered anyone in those circumstances.

Orton was aligned with the Wyatt Family at the time, but betrayed the group to challenge Bray Wyatt for the WWE Championship at WrestleMania 33. The two put on a dud of a match, memorable only for Wyatt’s spooky ring canvas projections, and which certainly ranks toward the bottom of WrestleMania’s list of title matches. The went on to top this silliness in a House of Horrors match, where Wyatt would defeat Orton, though, bizarrely, the Championship was not on the line.

Orton then lost the Championship to Jinder Mahal, marking the beginning of that wretched era. He would close out the year in his standard gear of bouncing around the upper midcard.

Truthfully, Orton only manages to rank this high because of the prestige associated with winning the WWE Championship at WrestleMania. Most of what surrounded this triumph, however, was questionable at best and horrible at worst.