WWE: No, Becky Lynch hasn’t lost steam after WrestleMania

Becky Lynch is one of WWE’s top stars and was the main hero of WrestleMania 35, winning the Raw and SmackDown Women’s Championships after becoming the first wrestler to pin Ronda Rousey. However, some fans are wondering if she’s lost some momentum after The Show of Shows.

WWE fans often talk about a “glass ceiling” in the company, and nobody faces a more difficult barrier to true superstardom in professional wrestling than women. The “glass ceiling” normally refers to the fact that women are far less likely to reach the highest levels of a company, and wrestling fans have re-appropriated that to mean all wrestlers in WWE.

If wrestling fans think ascendancy is difficult for even male wrestlers, imagine how important it was to see Becky become the biggest star in wrestling, knowing how much women’s voices and talent have been actively suppressed by WWE and even its fans.

Becky Lynch has done her best to show WWE that women should be at the top. She rose from being an afterthought on the WrestleMania 34 pre-show and left off of other Pay-Per-View cards to being the next potential John Cena replacement. “The Man” main evented WrestleMania 35, winning both the Raw and SmackDown Women’s Championships after months of great matches, excellent promos, and even better tweets.

Yet it is surprising to see, one month after WrestleMania, that some fans believe Becky has “lost steam”.

However, I don’t think that’s the case at all. Becky is entrenched as one of WWE’s biggest stars after all the excellent work she’s put in over her entire career and her push has clearly been a success. Lynch moves merch, boosts WWE’s social media numbers, helped TV ratings immensely during her road to the titles and is still right there with Roman Reigns in terms of search engine interest.

It may feel like Becky has cooled off, but that’s only because of her rivals at Money in the Bank. Wrestling fans are worn out from Charlotte Flair vs. Becky Lynch, even if it was one of the best wrestling rivalries of 2018 and featured the main roster’s best match of the year at Evolution. But that feud has already peaked.

However, the biggest problem is Lacey Evans. You know how John Cena has this whole “step up or step aside” spiel for up-and-coming wrestlers he feuds with? Becky has done the exact same thing with Evans, pushing all of the right buttons to get Evans to come right back at her. If Evans steps up, she gets herself over on the strength of her own skill. If she doesn’t step up, the fans simply don’t buy in.

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We’ve seen the latter with Evans. Called up too soon from NXT, Evans’s whole gimmick is easy to tune out. It’s one-dimensional and relies on tired tropes of sexism that only sexist men (seriously, the replies she gets on Twitter to tweets from the character are very disturbing) seem to be interested in. As crazy as it sounds, WWE is no longer primarily followed by gross dudes. Most of us just want to watch some great promos and wrestling. That hasn’t been happening in this Evans/Lynch feud.

Worse yet, WWE seems disinterested in giving Becky a real platform after WrestleMania. As my colleague Ashley Nagrant wrote, WWE gave their women a combined 11 minutes of air time over five hours of programming on Raw and SmackDown this past week. That’s simply unacceptable. How on earth is your biggest star, a double-champion, leading two divisions that get 3.7% of the total airtime. Women should be getting 50%, not less than 5%!

So if it seems like Becky has cooled off, it’s an illusion. WWE are the ones who have cooled off as a whole. SmackDown had less than 2 million viewers this past week (FOX can’t be happy), and Raw is in another post-WrestleMania funk. When WWE needed ratings boosts during WrestleMania season, Becky was there to save Raw. So why have WWE shown so little faith in a superstar who is only just behind Roman “Wild Card” Reigns in search engine popularity?

Becky’s promo on Charlotte about wanting to give Ember Moon, Bayley, and others opportunities received plenty of praise on Twitter and got the discussion rolling; it was another awesome promo from Becky, and it’s a reminder that her best work will come with better rivalries. And this whole Big E/Becky’s Mom thing, as unsettling as it is, has become the topic of discussion among wrestling fans after being started in Becky’s replies.

Lynch’s talent is without question, and both social media and search traffic indicators still show that she is a big deal. Becky has staying power as the double-champion, and “The Man” hasn’t lost respect or “steam”.

No, the real issue is the upcoming rivalries at Money in the Bank and WWE’s own refusal to care about women if they can’t use it to fuel their PR machine. Hopefully, WWE quickly realizes that they can’t succeed without giving their women a spotlight, because there’s a very good reason why Sasha Banks, perhaps WWE’s most talented woman, is interested in leaving.

Naomi vs. Becky and Bayley (or Ember) vs. Becky as summer feuds on both brands would indeed confirm that The Man is entrenched as one of wrestling’s biggest stars.