Bray Wyatt Has No Role in WWE After Poor Creative Booking

Over the past few months, frustrated WWE fans have had to witness the steady decline of one of the most promising acts to emerge in recent years. Bray Wyatt, backed by his fiercely loyal “family” members Luke Harper and Erick Rowan, has taken beatings on an alarmingly regular basis and now finds himself embroiled in a meaningless feud with Chris Jericho. Where did it all go wrong for the Wyatts?

A simple comparison can be drawn with the evolution of The Shield. A new and exciting stable tearing up the company was epitomised in one night. At the Extreme Rules Pay-Per-View in May 2013 all three members of The Shield captured championship gold. Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins became Tag Team Champions and Dean Ambrose won the US Title, cementing their dominance and justifying their demand that fans “believe in The Shield.”

But who still believes in the Wyatts?

After a similarly promising start, the Wyatts have lost a lot of their credibility as the ruthless, destructive trio they were introduced as. Bray Wyatt’s intoxicating monologues only garner intrigue if the fans are able to believe in his ability to make good on his bold claims. His empty promises to bring out the dark side of John Cena were shattered when the 15-time Champion quite literally buried him at their Last Man Standing match at Payback.

As Cena moved on to bigger and better things, Wyatt was left to pick out his next arbitrary victim. In truth, a Chris Jericho-Bray Wyatt feud sounds respectable on paper, but it has thus far failed to ignite the fans’ passion. Much of this is down to the half-hearted reasoning behind Wyatt’s decision to attack Jericho. In a radio interview hosted by morelikeradio.org’s Gary Cantrell, former WWE Creative team member Andrew Goldstein indicated that this was an ongoing issue.

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My big frustration in the beginning was Bray Wyatt was saying a lot of things but none of it mattered. None of it made sense. None of it meant anything. He put Kane on the shelf and no one really cared because they never explained why. We weren't getting the why to the Wyatt Family. We were just getting these bizarre promos and bizarre sort of black out moments. We just weren't getting a reason why they were terrorizing who they were terrorizing.

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Regardless, Creative had a chance to reinstate some of Wyatt’s charisma by setting him up to defeat The Ayatollah of Rock 'n' Rolla but again failed miserably. Their anti-climactic match at Battleground saw Jericho come out on top. Sure, Wyatt won the rematch at the vastly more important PPV SummerSlam just a month later, but who cares? Jericho should have lost at Battleground to allow Wyatt to fight a bigger name at SummerSlam, instead of simply proving he’s about as good as an aging Y2J. Four losses in six PPVs is simply not enough for an individual who claims to have the whole world in his hands.

Jonathan Bachman/Associated Press

Sadly, the other two members of the Wyatts have been led down a similarly disappointing path. If WWE aren’t ready to make Bray Wyatt the World Heavyweight Champion then allowing Luke Harper and Erick Rowan to dominate the tag team division would at least establish the Wyatt family as a force to be reckoned with. Despite being over with the fans and Luke Harper’s Undertaker-esque high-flying manoeuvres going down a treat, the giant duo have twice failed to beat Jimmy and Jey Uso at the Money in the Bank and Battleground PPVs for Tag Team gold.

In an interview conducted by Laura Martin (Needham & Company) at Needham Interconnect Conference in New York City and revealed right here by Bleacher Report’s Chris Harrington, Triple H appeared to take some credit for reinventing Bray Wyatt as the cult-leading Buzzard beacon he is today.

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He wasn’t quite connecting with the crowd. Decent hand. Talented kid. Right person. They were going to let him go and I said, ‘Let me take him and do something with him.’ We moved that character to NXT. We put some other people around him that fit the package. Moved him back onto Raw and Smackdown, and he’s one of our most popular superstars Bray Wyatt. I’ll go out on a limb and say in 10 years Bray Wyatt will be one of the most memorable characters in WWE.

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If HHH truly believes that Bray Wyatt will be that memorable, why is he being billed in such forgettable feuds? The distinct lack of substance behind the stories means that nobody will recall Wyatt–Jericho with any great deal of nostalgia, yet just last night it was dragged on even further with a cage match between the two opening the show. Wyatt won but once again he was left to rely on his makeshift lumberjacks after Jericho dominated proceedings and scaled the cage with relative ease, before being forced to leap back into the ring. This is not the Jericho that beat Stone Cold and the Brahma Bull in one night. This is a shell of the old Jericho, a man that lost to Fandango at Wrestlemania XXIX.

It seems unthinkable now that The Undertaker was once in a similar predicament to Bray Wyatt, but seasoned fans will recall The Phenom experiencing a comparable run of fruitless feuds. For some time he was unmatched until he found a saving grace in the emergence of Mankind. The tables were flipped, and suddenly Undertaker was on the back foot of the demented mind games of Mick Foley. The perfectly matched rivalry lasted two years and culminated in the unforgettable Hell in a Cell match at King of the Ring in 1998. If Creative made or re-invented a character created solely to toy with Wyatt, it could be the lifeline he so desperately needs.

Bray Wyatt’s character has been dealt a huge deal of damage by poor creative direction already, but the situation is manageable. Harper and Rowan should be pulled from their big-men-face-big-men rivalry with Big Show and Mark Henry and instead should not only win the Tag Team Championships but also dominate the division for the foreseeable future. Wyatt should be given a carefully crafted storyline with substance that the fans can truly get on board with. If Creative continue to throw Wyatt into matches with no believable backstory, the “boring” chants he endured a few weeks ago on Raw will unfortunately become much more frequent.