WWE Vengeance 2011 Results: Cody Rhodes Fails in Biggest Match of Career

Cody Rhodes finally had his moment in the spotlight at Vengeance on Sunday night. He was getting a shot against Randy Orton in the most high-profile singles match of his career. This was going to be the night that launched him into the upper-echelon of workers in WWE.

Unfortunately for Rhodes, things did not work out as planned. The match was okay, but not at the level it needed to be in order to make him look like a star. They had the time to make the match great, but it just didn’t click.

Not all of that is Rhodes’ fault; it takes two wrestlers to make a great match and Orton did not have his best on this night. But because Orton is who he is, there is no way that he is going to be blamed for anything that happened.

The other problem with Rhodes on this night, other than a mediocre in-ring performance, is the fact that the crowd never took him seriously. They did not react to him like he could be a top star in WWE, and the biggest reason for that is his lame gimmick.

Rhodes has improved on the microphone in recent months, but he has been given a terrible gimmick that instantly kills his credibility with the crowd. Never was that more apparent than last night in San Antonio.

We can say that Rhodes is better as a talker, but if you are given terrible material to say it does not really do you a lot of good.

I do not want to be so quick to jump off the Cody Rhodes’ bandwagon because he has a lot of potential and can be a top worker on SmackDown under the right circumstances.

The problem is whenever WWE pushes a young guy and he does not become the next Randy Orton or John Cena on their first time out, they get buried the next night on television.

Since Rhodes has a father who has worked for WWE before and is in their Hall of Fame, he will likely be given one more shot to prove himself. But he has to get better his second time around because these chances do not come too often.