The Heel Report: 08.24.13: Corporate Makeover

Each Week there are ten places, with points out of ten awarded based on these positions. These points are then added to a rolling chart that will continue each week to show who is wrestling’s overall top heel, after 100 weeks naming the reigning wrestler a ‘Heel Centurion’.

Aw hell yeah! After what seemed like fifty shades of grey, the WWE is finally back to having a big ol’ heel presence in the form of the newly reunited McMahon family, what’s more with John Cena and Sheamus both gone from active competition, and Randy Orton turning to the dark side, it will be up to guys like Dolph Ziggler, C.M. Punk, Cody Rhodes and Daniel Bryan to pick up the slack, frankly I am excited to see how these four former great heels will deal with their relatively new opportunities; will Punk and Bryan become the next Rock and Austin? Will Ziggler and Rhodes finally get to become main event players? Or will it all go up in smoke? And who will come into focus on the heel side of things? For now we’ll just have to wait and see, and keep on counting those heel points!

This is a place where the heels of wrestling can be praised for all the hard work they do trying to get us all to hate them (or in other words the smarkiest chart of smarkdom ever to smark), so without further ado let’s get on with the report…

1st Place: HHH

The landscape in the WWE has changed, a lot. Instead of having a bunch of loose entities around who are all following their own agenda, now there is a new united force, in charge of the company and with one philosophy; doing what is best for business and giving the fans an ‘A+’ quality champion. When HHH dropped Bryan after his title win I had the same reaction as many others: “what is this shit? Why is HHH inserting himself again at the cost of a rising star? And how does it make sense for HHH to help Orton? Vince McMahon sure, but HHH, no way!” But then Raw rolled around and as soon as HHH explained the difference he saw between personal and business, everything was alright again. HHH is back to being a proper heel, and what’s more the best type of heel; one who has arguably justified motives for his actions. With Cena and Sheamus gone, Orton turned and Punk dealing with Heyman, there is a real chance here for Bryan to shine in a major way and become a true face of the company, and after Monday Night all I can see is that HHH’s betrayal will help him in that, just so long as things don’t go as bad as they did in the second Summer of Punk.

2nd Place: The Shield

One of the biggest surprises for me from Raw, although a completely understandable one, is that the Shield are now doing the bidding of the McMahon family. This can only be a good thing as the whole ‘who can beat them as a team’ gimmick has basically run its course and they needed a new focus to keep them looking strong after seeming to wane since the Wyatt Family debuted. Now sure a trend of ‘you’ve misbehaved; handicap match with the Shield’ could get old really fast, but of all the times an authority group has had a set of enforcers to do their dirty work, arguably none have been a better unit to do the job than them. The Shield are believably bad-ass, especially when they have the odds stacked in their favour, this new position in the company also eases the underlying tension of why exactly more isn’t done about this group that potentially pose a threat to the most established stars on the roster and the company itself. Hell you could go so far as to say that it retroactively explains why nothing was done before as well as perhaps the McMahons were keeping the group around just in case they needed them to do their bidding at some point (there are some holes to this but for the most part they can be glossed over).

3rd Place: Randy Orton

The new WWE champ has finally gotten his wish of turning heel and despite being on two strikes in the company he also finds himself in a key role in one of the biggest angles since the second Summer of Punk in 2011. An Orton-Bryan feud could be really great, it could also be infuriatingly bad depending on how it is booked. Just look at the Orton-Christian feud that went along with the HHH-Punk feud, as well as HHH overshadowing Punk’s rise to stardom and putting a dampner on what could have been the biggest thing in recent wrestling history, Orton’s constant triumphing over Christian showed where the WWE’s true alligences lay. Hopefully they have seen the light and both Orton and HHH will actually be agents of positive change, rather than roadblocks to the cause. So far despite some protests to the contrary, it seems like they indeed are set on helping usher in Daniel Bryan as the potential new Stone Cold of 2010s.

4th Place: The McMahons

Speaking of repeats, there have been quite a few complaints about the Corperation 2.0 or 2K13, however I really don’t think that is such a bad thing. After all the whole angle was over ten years ago, why not go over old ground, as long as it is with a new attitude and aspects to make it interesting again. So far Vince and Stephanie have played their parts to a tee and it is clear that while there are similarities between now and then, things are pretty different in many ways, such as all the McMahons being outed as conniving manipulators now that HHH has shown his true colours. What’s more while the sobbing Stephanie of the past couple of months has been generally terrible, the corperate Stephanie has already had some great lines, such as calling Daniel Bryan a ‘solid B+’. Stuff like that is really great and it gives Bryan someone to work against to make him look like an even bigger hero at the end of the day. On the Vince side of things, while it was nice seeing him get involved to put Bryan over as someone who he ‘really didn’t want to see as WWE champion’, code for ‘he really does want to see Bryan as champion’, this current set up, where he seems to be taking a backseat to HHH, could work a whole lot better than McMahon vs. HHH with an advocate on both sides, hell HHH would never let anyone fight for him anyway.

5th Place: Alberto Del Rio

I’m a little chagrin by this placement as honestly I really don’t like Del Rio as champion. I don’t care if his matches are pretty decent when he is in there with a good opponent, they will never be great matches because he simply isn’t appealing enough, either as a likeable character or as a dastardly heel, no matter how many portly announcers he downs. He is the anti-Cena, who is a twat with little actual natural technical ability, but who polarises people so much that when he goes against a decent enough opponent can put on a five-star match because of (and I hate that I am going to say this) the reaction he provokes, just look at his match with Bryan at Summerslam. Still Del Rio remains the champion and has to get points for trying, maybe RVD can take the belt off of him, but personally I would prefer that this new feud with RVD be filler before Cody Rhodes is built up enough to get a shot at the belt, and win.

6th Place: The Wyatt Family

I will admit that the match at Summerslam was not exactly a five-star affair, and despite being the first of its kind in the WWE, they already seem to have found a way to break the gimmick for the Ring of Fire match. Despite these shenanigans the main aim of the match was achieved, and that was to put Wyatt over, beating Kane and then taking him out and away for some unknown purpose.

7th Place: Bully Ray

With all the Summerslam craziness and proceeding Raw fallout it is easy to forget that this week also saw the Bully regain his title from Chris Sabin in a steel cage match, when will they learn that those things never work. Whatever the situation with washed up MMA fighters, the championship is back where it belongs now and hopefully things can get back on track rather than being a mess of swerves and irrelevant character reveals…although arguably that IS business as usual for the company.

8th Place: Heyman & Lesnar

Both men were responsible so both men share the spot. The Beast won out in the end and hopefully there will be a rematch at some point as the pairing was pretty much the best Lesnar match to date and another round could be put together even better than before. The good news is that the feud between Heyman and Punk continues and there are plenty of places for it to go before it runs its course, we’ll just have to see where that course goes from here.

9th Place: Influencing Factors

Yes it is my own name, and no I don’t think it will catch on, but I wanted to feature all three men and the only way to do so on such a tightly packed chart was to pool their collective efforts into one awesome team, although arguably they should be count as that already. The three men working together managed to secure both Bobby Roode and Kazarian twenty points each in the BFG Series, and poor Christopher Daniels got none. With the help of a couple of slung Appletinis all three men are now serious contenders to end up in the final four for the series, and hopefully things will only get better from here.

10th Place: Ryback

Ryback is a dick, plain and simple, and I love it. However much like his taking out jobbers two at a time I’m not exactly sure where this can lead in the long term. I suppose someone will try to stop him being a bully, probably Big Show, then he will lose, and then will have to start all over again.

(Week 006)

1. Alberto Del Rio (32)

2. AJ Lee (25)

3. Bully Ray (24)

4. Bray Wyatt (23)

5. Damien Sandow (23)

6. Dean Ambrose (19)

7. Robert Roode (15)

8. Ryback (14)

9. Roman Reigns (12)

10. Seth Rollins (12)

Heel Centurions:

Stephen Randle provides a post-Summerslam appraisal in The Wrestling News Experience

Nick Marsico shows what a difference a day makes in The Tuesday Communique

Joseph Lee presents the third installment in his list of most important horror movies in A Bloody Good Time

Look at how wrong/right we all were in the Summerslam Roundtable

And finally the 411 staff break it down in the Wrestler of The Week