Clean Wins Key to Validating Seth Rollins as Main Event Star

The journey of Seth Rollins to the top of WWE and main event status happened seemingly overnight.

Blasting former Shield teammates Roman Reigns and Dean Ambrose allowed Rollins to break free from the pack, to leave his fellow Hounds of Justice behind and establish himself as one of the faces of WWE's bright future via singles competition.

Of course, the fact he was aligned with the most powerful force in wrestling, The Authority, did not hurt matters.

Soon, he was Mr. Money in the Bank, scoring numerous wins over Ambrose and was Triple H and Stephanie McMahon's "golden boy," the top villain in the company. Along with that status came the opportunity to mix it up with the likes of John Cena and Randy Orton.

Unfortunately for Rollins, no matter how many wins he secures or how the spotlight shines brightly on him because of the Money in the Bank briefcase, he will only be fully legitimized via clean wins over top stars.

Yes, the pro wrestling industry was built on villains cheating their way to victory over the heroes before finally getting their comeuppance, but eventually, those same villains needed clean wins to bring some credibility to their acts.

To this point, Rollins' act has been hampered tremendously by constant interference by his personal security team consisting of Jamie Noble and Joey Mercury, not to mention other members of The Authority, when that faction was still in power.

While that helps with crowd heat, it also kills any opportunity Rollins has to prove himself capable of hanging with top stars without the assistance of anyone. In the eyes of the audience, he will never truly be a star on the level of Cena or Orton or even the aforementioned Reigns because they do not believe he can fairly defeat any of them.

In their minds, he will always be a second-tier guy who only occasionally wins matches against legitimate headliners because of the constant interference from Noble, Mercury or other outside forces.

A fair and clean win over Cena could bring an end to any doubts. Rollins has already scored a noncontroversial victory against Orton. That came via rollup on the November 4 episode of Raw, but it had no real follow-up.

Using his trademark Curb Stomp finisher to put either The Viper or the leader of Cenation away would give him that one signature win to really strengthen his grasp on the top heel spot on WWE's incredibly talented roster.

Otherwise, he is doomed to follow in the footsteps of other "flavor of the month" heels, such as Wade Barrett, The Miz, R-Truth and even CM Punk, all of whom stepped up to the plate to battle WWE's top babyfaces and enjoyed uneventful, generic heel runs since they were never allowed the opportunity to cleanly secure a win.