Kevin Owens' Quick Return the Latest Example of WWE Rushing Promising Storylines

Kevin Owens' return to Raw on Monday night after only one week away frustrated fans hoping for a better payoff, though it was far from the first time WWE has rushed a promising storyline.

Months of losing to the likes of Braun Strowman, Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins was enough to push KO to his breaking point and lead to him "quitting" the company. Akin to almost any other angle involving someone leaving WWE, his absence from Raw didn't last long, though.

Speculation he would be brought back as a "Paul Heyman Guy" or as a babyface was all for naught when he resurfaced on Raw this past week to target Bobby Lashley. Anyone surprised by this turn of events, however, clearly hasn't been paying attention to the product for the last decade.

WWE's handling of the Invasion angle in 2001 is perhaps the most egregious example of the company rushing a storyline that should have been a game-changer.

Instead of waiting until bigger stars such as Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan and Goldberg signed so they could be a part of it, WWE wasted no time in taking the scraps from WCW and ECW and putting them together for one mess of a faction. It ran through November 2001 and did not end well for The Alliance due to never being booked as threats to their WWE counterparts.

Then again, factions have never been WWE's strong suit. Evolution, The Nexus and even The Shield split up prematurely because of the company's inability to watch an angle play out organically.

Although Evolution ultimately lasted over two years, Randy Orton's exit from the group in August 2004 was horribly rushed. Triple H turned on the up-and-comer one night removed from his grand World Heavyweight Championship victory at SummerSlam, whereas tension should have been teased between the two over the course of a few months and not two days.

With The Nexus, WWE had the right idea by building them up as a force to be reckoned with during the summer of 2010, but their fall from grace came way sooner than it should have. John Cena vanquished the NXT alumni with ease at SummerSlam and they were never the same from that point forward.

As well-protected as The Shield was through its entire run, Seth Rollins betraying his brethren in 2014 occurred at the peak of the trio's popularity. It was a shocker, for sure, but WWE sometimes opts to swerve its viewers over booking logically and for the long term.

Similar to Owens, CM Punk "walked out" on WWE in July 2011 after winning the WWE Championship from Cena. It was easily the most engaging angle the company had produced in years and could have gone in a number of different directions.

It was unknown where Punk would pop up next, but WWE didn't hesitate in bringing him back to TV a mere eight days later. Again, it made for a memorable moment on Raw when he confronted Cena, but there was potential for it to be so much more.

From Daniel Bryan's time with The Wyatt Family lasting all of two weeks to Bayley beating Charlotte Flair for the Raw Women's Championship on a random episode of the show, rushed storylines have been among the product's biggest flaws in recent years as well.

It speaks volumes that WWE talent are also aware this is a problem. During a 2017 interview with Sports Illustrated, Big Show noted how the company has a tendency to speed up certain stories to their own detriment: "Sometimes, when stories are rushed or put together too fast, people can't enjoy them. That's the only criticism I have with our industry right now, it's really tough to build stories like we used to."

Even with more television available for them to work with than ever before, WWE still struggles to tell stories the right way, by allowing them to develop over time and not immediately skipping to the conclusion (or abandoning the angle altogether) simply because it didn't have the result they wanted that first week.

Graham Mirmina, aka Graham "GSM" Matthews, is an Endicott College alumnus and aspiring journalist. Visit his website, Next Era Wrestling, and "like" his official Facebook page to continue the conversation on all things wrestling.