Why Shayna Baszler should win the 2020 Women’s Royal Rumble

Now that she’s lost the NXT Women’s Championship, it’s time for Shayna Baszler to move on to something bigger, namely winning the Women’s Royal Rumble.

We are now a month removed from Shayna Baszler’s 416-day reign as NXT Champion ending at the hands of Rhea Ripley, and in that time, we’ve seen very little of the woman who has spent the last two years crunching the cartilages and twisting the tendons of almost all of her contemporaries.

Baszler’s time away from WWE programming over the last four weeks, aside from a surprise appearance in an excellent number one contender’s battle royal on the Jan. 15 NXT and a match against Shotzi Blackheart a week later, has led to plenty of speculation among fans: Will she stay in NXT or will she finally move up to the main roster?

The only people who know what Baszler will do are Vince McMahon and the rest of his brain trust, but what they should do is obvious: promote Baszler to the main roster and book her to win the 2020 Women’s Royal Rumble. And when you look at the landscape of the RAW and SmackDown women’s divisions, the stars seem to be aligned for such a victory.

If you don’t believe me, go to Wikipedia or WWE.com right now and look up the RAW and SmackDown women’s rosters and then look up who has been announced for the women’s Rumble. In fact, I’ll even place the links right here to help you out.

Outside of Sasha Banks – who could win to kickstart that long-awaited feud with Bayley – and maybe Charlotte Flair, who stands out as an obvious candidate to challenge for either women’s championship at WrestleMania based on how they’ve been pushed? The most generous answer you could give is “maybe one or two”.

There’s no denying the in-ring talent that many of the women on the main roster possess, but WWE choosing to prioritize only a handful of them makes envisioning, say, Billie Kay or Nikki Cross winning require an industrial-strength suspension of disbelief. WWE won’t run into that problem for Baszler for two reasons: her stature as a two-time champion and her ready-made storyline with RAW Women’s Champion Becky Lynch.

WWE gave the fans a taste of how good a full-fledged program between Baszler and Lynch could be during the otherwise-inane build to Survivor Series last November and further teased a singles match when Lynch attacked Baszler after Baszler forced SmackDown Women’s Champion Bayley to tap out to the Kirifuda Clutch in the main event of that show. Both of interactions signified WWE’s intentions to match those two up at a later event, with most presuming WrestleMania would be said event.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Baszler vs. Lynch at WrestleMania 36 is an inevitability; after all, this company loves nothing more than booking Lynch vs. Flair matches, and Ronda Rousey having the third-best betting odds to win the Rumble feels like more than just a means to separate suckers from their money.

But even when you factor in those legitimate possibilities, Baszler winning the Women’s Rumble is the right direction to go, not only because there’s virtually nothing left for her to accomplish in NXT, but also because she is the type of heel the main roster women’s division needs.

Even though the booking of the women on RAW and SmackDown has improved over the last few years, the creative team still relies heavily on the same “Mean Girls” high school bully tropes that felt out of date in 2010, let alone 2020. Even the ones that avoid this typecasting, like Bayley and Sasha Banks, come across as a collection of cliches more than they do actual people.

This will make Baszler’s character – a domineering bully who backs up everything she says one limb at a time but knows how to cower to a babyface that is unfazed by her antics – stand out all the more. She’s a person that exists in reality, not one who was yanked out of a 90s teen drama, and that’s exactly the person Lynch needs to put a jolt into her title reign.

These scenarios sound great and a Baszler Rumble win is all that needs to happen to get us there.