The Miz Has Earned Shot at Main Event Feud on WWE SmackDown Live

For the last six months, The Miz has been doing the best work of his career.

WWE should acknowledge that. 2016 was the year of AJ Styles, but 2017 should be the year of The Miz. No more Intercontinental Championship feuds. It's time to go after the WWE Championship.

This would not be The Miz's first rodeo. He won the Money in the Bank briefcase and became WWE champion in 2010. He main-evented WrestleMania in 2011, where he successfully defended his championship against John Cena.

But he then lost the title to Cena at Extreme Rules. CM Punk, Daniel Bryan and The Shield rose in prominence. And most fans seemed to accept that The Miz's time had come and gone. After all, he had been given a chance to run with the ball. And as a former Real World housemate and Tough Enough contestant, The Miz was lucky to have done that.

Hindsight, however, is 20-20. The Miz's work from 2008 to 2011 demonstrates excellent technical progress in a short amount of time. And after he split from John Morrison during the draft, The Miz significantly stepped up his mic game.

One of his best promos was during his feud with MVP, when he began speaking backstage before marching through the curtain. It was inspired by real-life, backstage drama, and it showcased a young wrestler who was fully formed and at ease with himself.

So what went wrong? Why did The Miz fail to connect with audiences at the time?

It was a combination of things. There was his reality-show background, which has always been a hurdle to his legitimacy. There was the timing factor. Cena was still a full-time performer with no suitable replacement on the horizon. There was also the manner in which The Miz won his matches—always through underhanded means or with the assistance of Alex Riley—which painted him as a "weak" champion.

The Miz was not the first heel champion to be an opportunistic weasel—Edge made an entire gimmick out of it, and he was one of the most over Superstars in recent memory. But unlike Edge, The Miz didn't have a signature moment—a highlight spot that stuck in people's memories. He didn't have an iconic match that fans remembered as a turning point in his career.

Edge had his spear to Jeff Hardy at WrestleMania X-Seven. He had his classic match against John Cena at Unforgiven in 2006. What comparable, iconic thing has The Miz done that deserves mention in the same breath? The Miz worked, as Bryan put it this past summer, a "safe" style that discouraged these sorts of highlights. Meanwhile, Edge retired early. Bryan retired early.

But this summer, The Miz finally got his highlight. And it came not during a match, but during a promo on Talking Smack in which the The Miz responded to Bryan's accusations in blistering, brutal fashion.

And ever since then, The Miz has been rolling. His promos are fire. His in-ring intensity is at an all-time high. His recent feud against Dolph Ziggler was exceptional. The Miz has Maryse, who is a much better companion than Riley or Damien Sandow ever were.

But most importantly, The Miz gets legitimate boos and heat from the fans. He's not a tweener, and he's never ironically cheered. Fans don't "love to hate him." They genuinely hate him, which means he's fantastic at doing his job.

Whether in the Royal Rumble match (where he's a dark horse to win), at The Show of Shows or on the post-WrestleMania SmackDown, The Miz deserves another shot at the big prize. A fight against AJ Styles could turn The Phenomenal One into a full-fledged babyface. A fight against Cena would have psychological layers that their first encounter never had, and this time, The Rock wouldn't be there to steal The Miz's thunder.

The Miz is a main eventer who earned his spot rather than lucking into it. The man's a great wrestler, and he deserves to be treated as such.