Triple H and WWE's Growing Jey Uso Problem

There's a new headliner in WWE: Jey Uso. 

Unfortunately for Jey Uso and WWE, he's not a headliner in the sense of a main event star who can put the company on his back. No, he's a headliner example of how WWE shouldn't be handling stars. 

There was a time when WWE rewarded Jey for organically getting over with crowds. He captured the all-important younger audience with his Yeet sessions and moved mega-merchandise numbers.

It was questionable at the time, but even always-online fans could admit that, if nothing else, WWE was smart to reward a wrestler for actually getting themselves over. 

But over time, and especially in recent months, things have soured to an almost disturbing degree. 

Ahead of Night of Champions, there is Jey in the finals of the King of the Ring bracket against…Oba Femi. 

Femi, who has rocketed to superstardom to the point Roman Reigns was calling him out after the main event of WrestleMania. Femi, who already retired—and will probably again "retire"—Brock Lesnar. Femi, a solo star whose character is just getting off the ground floor. 

Jey, meanwhile, moved past the likes of LA Knight, Finn Bálor and Je'Von Evans on his way to the finals. This, despite no meaningful character development. 

There's a concerning possibility now that WWE throws out a dusty finish via Lesnar and has Femi lose to Jey, too. It feels like a slim chance, but given how the promotion has booked both guys as of late, who could say it's totally impossible?

The real kicker here is that Jey hasn't changed anything up. It's the same criticism deservingly lobbed at someone like Cody Rhodes, except Jey is far less accomplished. He's still Yeeting and trying to come up with other catchphrases to throw on merch. Match quality, for the most part, remains erratic at best, too. 

In Internet circles, at least, Jey is just as infamous, if not more so for his botches than Knight. Yet, Knight won't get pushed by WWE despite even bigger reactions from live audiences at his peak, whereas Jey just can't seem to stay out of the spotlight. 

A shame, too, considering Jey exists in the Bloodline orbit. The Bloodline saga evolved how we think about storytelling possibilities in the pro wrestling medium. If WWE were patient at all, Jey could have received serious character development and tweaks over a matter of months before getting back to the main event scene. 

Instead, he's just there in the main event scene, and everyone has to pretend not to see the iffy matches, if not botches, while enduring the same old thing while other wrestlers get cast aside. 

All of this is to say that there needs to be a balance. WWE doesn't need to pull a Kofi Kingston and relegate him back to the tag division forever, forbidding him (pathetic behavior on WWE's part toward Kingston, by the way. Shameful, too.) from so much as mentioning his solo run again. 

But Jey is a good embodiment of the lag around WWE booking. It's one thing for pro wrestling booking to make a mistake, identify it and course-correct quickly. It's another to whiff, then not get the proper vibe that enables a course correction. 

For whatever reason, WWE didn't get the sense that Jey's act was wearing thin with crowds. It was obvious months ago, perhaps even to fans who initially loved everything about his push. 

This is salvageable, no doubt. But WWE now sits on the cusp of a massive mistake in the Femi-Uso match. It needs to properly navigate that before going back to the drawing board with Jey. Even that is an opportunity most wrestlers probably wouldn't get mid-fizzling-out like this. 

And look, we can only knock WWE so much: Everyone has begged for it to create new main event stars. It has with Uso. But there are clearly some growing pains it needs to fix now that it has established how to get Superstars there. Getting there is one thing. Staying there in a way that doesn't create fan backlash or even disinterest is another. 

In that sense, Jey is an ongoing experiment. The needle's leaning toward failure, but in pro wrestling, there's always wiggle room to turn a misfire with backs against the wall into a blueprint for something better.