WWE Proved It Has a Clear Plan for Daniel Bryan with Closing Segment of Raw

While it's been going on for months, consternation over Daniel Bryan's spot on the WWE totem pole has been at an all-time high the last few weeks.  There's been talk of everything from ignorance to intentional sabotage in how he's been handled, especially once he voluntarily joined the Wyatt Family.  Some people even thought it was a permanent heel turn.

We can argue about how long WWE has really been invested in Bryan, or if the mainstream attention the "YES!" chants were getting forced their hand at all in speeding up the Wyatt Family storyline.  Regardless, last night, two weeks before the Royal Rumble, traditionally the second biggest show of the year, they built Raw around Bryan getting Bray Wyatt in a locked cage and good prevailing at the end of the show.

Throughout the show last night, especially past the halfway point, I started to see a bunch of tweets asking the same question: Why was the show basically wall-to-wall wrestling with the exception of the weirdly downplayed attack by Randy Orton on John Cena's father?  We got that answer with the show-closing angle.

Bryan and Wyatt were taking on The Usos in a cage match with the door chained shut and Kane holding the key, so the match could only be won by pinfall, submission or escape over the top of the cage.  With the door out of play, both teams needed to find ways to escape simultaneously to avoid trapping their partners  The Usos escaped, and obviously Wyatt was angry.

After a few teases, Bryan exploded when Wyatt called him a coward and pounced on him.  Using Wyatt as a battering ram, he knocked Luke Harper and Erick Rowan off the cage, leaving no obstacles for him to then beat the hell out of Wyatt.  He ripped off his Wyatt Family coveralls to reveal his usual gear, led the crowd in "YES!" chants, and nailed Wyatt with the Busaiku Knee before heading to the top of the cage to celebrate as the show went off the air.

If you didn't see Raw last night, words can't do the crowd reaction justice.  You need to watch the YouTube clips embedded here.  It was one of those magical moments that justifies why you've kept watching pro wrestling into adulthood in spite of all of the goofiness and social stigmas.  When something clicks in a big way, that's when pro wrestling is unlike any other form of entertainment, and WWE's sometimes generous assessments of what makes them special are completely justified.

What makes it even more amazing is that a lot of the criticism was warranted and the whole Bryan joining the Wyatts storyline wasn't that good.  It wasn't quite set up well enough, and Bryan wasn't given enough promo time to really get the overarching storyline over.  Still, the fans are so in love with Bryan that after being fairly dead for the cage match with heel Bryan who they didn't want to see, they gave him a Steve Austin level reaction last night.  And WWE clearly knew he would.

The whole construction of that show with the lack of angles and promos, the choice of camera angles, the important detail that nobody was getting in the cage door...all of it was carefully instructed to craft a memorable angle with great visuals to set Bryan up as a focal point of WWE right now.  It's also led to an interesting fan theory that's picked up some steam: Kane is Bryan's "man on the inside" in The Authority.

It makes sense: First and foremost, Kane kind of disappeared with the key last night, and that got the wheels turning in a lot of people's heads.  When you look back at the Kane storyline, he returned at Hell in a Cell to attack the Wyatt Family, Bryan was screwed out of his one "fair" shot at the WWE Championship later that night, and Kane submitted himself to Stephanie McMahon "for no apparent reason" the next night on Raw.  If our hunches are right, it's a really clever long-term storyline that's building to a great payoff.

Obviously Bryan vs Wyatt is happening at the Royal Rumble PPV.  Where does Bryan go from there, though?  Let us know what you think in the comments.

David Bixenspan has been Bleacher Report's WWE Team Leader and a contracted columnist since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @davidbix and check out his wrestling podcasts at LLTPod.com.

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