Seth Rollins is one of the most interesting wrestlers to me right now. He has been for a while. Rollins is presented on WWE television as a massive star, being one of the first faces you see on most shows over the last few years. The crowd reacts loudly to most things he does and they love singing his song. He’s a multi-time world champion and has achieved pretty much everything there is to do in WWE. So, why doesn’t he feel like a big deal?
Be honest with yourself, if WWE are coming to do a show in your town and you want to go, Seth Rollins being on that show probably isn’t going to get you to fork over your cash. When you think of a big WrestleMania main event you think of big names like Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage, Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, John Cena, even recent names like Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes have managed to make their names feel huge. Like just typing the letters of these guys’ names feels important. But, when I type Seth Rollins’ name, there’s not much feeling. Now, this is obviously going to be a completely opinionated article so if you feel differently then that’s totally okay. I actually like Seth Rollins (as you can see by me centering the main storyline of WWE around him after WrestleMania 40), I’m just so interested in that innate feeling I have about him that prevents me from seeing him alongside the top tier of wrestlers.
Right now, the top tier of WWE to me is four names: Roman Reigns, Cody Rhodes, CM Punk, and Rhea Ripley.
These four are the biggest stars and all have some sort of mainstream crossover and appeal. Especially Rhea, who’s pretty much the only one of these four that I’ve had people in real life bring up on their own when I mention that I like wrestling. When I rebook big shows like a WrestleMania I always want the main event to feel big and for the 2020 shows, all of these names reliably give me that feeling.
But, Seth Rollins doesn’t. He just feels too everyday. Too consistent. Not fresh. But why?
Firstly, he’s got the curse of the workhorse. This is when wrestlers who aren’t the biggest, aren’t the strongest, aren’t the most famous, try to raise their standing in the company by outworking their competition. Wrestling as much and as hard as possible, becoming someone that can always be relied upon to put on a good match or cut a good promo. Basically making something good out of thin air that pleases both the viewer at home and the live crowd. This is often very effective and is able to get guys from the bottom of the card to close to the top. But a lot of the time they hit a ceiling.
Think of a guy like Dolph Ziggler. This workhorse mentality was his ethos throughout his whole run in WWE and it got him out of the depths of Kerwin White’s caddy to becoming a two-time World Heavyweight Champion. However, he never felt like a true main eventer. Imagine right now, WrestleMania 31, the dominant WWE champion, the man who conquered The Undertaker’s WrestleMania streak, the Beast Brock Lesnar defending the WWE Championship in the main event of WrestleMania 31 against… Dolph Ziggler. Just doesn’t feel right. Even after coming off of his legendary Survivor Series performance, there’s just no world where I can imagine Dolph Ziggler beating Brock Lesnar for the WWE Championship and being the guy that the show revolves around.
Part of it is definitely the name. But another part is the same thing that affects Seth Rollins and it’s that we see them too much. Their workhorse attitude is working against them once they get close to the top. By wanting to be on every show, always available, always working, seeing them doesn’t feel special. Since they’re always around, they feel normal. It allows us to take them for granted.
This wasn’t always the case for Seth Rollins, though. I feel like I have to mention the mythical 2015 Rollins. This run for him should honestly be talked about way more. This is where he peaked for me. He had the right character, look, and man his athleticism was off the charts. There was a bounce he had at this time that he never got back after his ACL injury. It gave all his matches this spark and high pace which felt different from the rest of the show and meshed well with the rest of the main event scene. And let’s just take a moment to remember his Summerslam 2015 gear, spectacular.
I also loved how when he turned on The Shield in early 2014, you could see him slowly come into this new character through the evolution of his gear. At first, it was just a plain black and then these nice leather sections got added to the sides of his thighs which helped gives his tights some visual identity with texture rather than colour. And then, around WrestleMania 31 he added the gold outlines to these leather sections which worked well thematically as this was when he won WWE Championship gold. I don’t know if any of this was intentional but as a kid I always thought his gear was awesome and spent so long trying to recreate it in the games.
Now, his booking at this time certainly could’ve been better as he should’ve been booked much more competently on his own but that’s something that I’ll touch on in one of my rebooking posts.
But after this heel run he returned as a workhorse character and I think this lowered his potential. To get over as a face, he was wrestling on TV all the time and putting on great matches. On paper it sounds great and as a viewer it was mostly great. But, as the years went by we started to learn about how badly Seth wanted to become the face of the company and I think this workhorse positioning harmed that ambition.
Look at how the most recent face of the company, Cody Rhodes, seamlessly got himself to feel like a big deal. Yes, he wrestled on TV but he never overdid it and never cut the stereotypical fighting champion style promo. He made sure that it felt special when you saw a Cody Rhodes match. Still he showed up every week but mostly he got himself over as The Guy through promos and giving the audience a strong reason to care about him and his desire to be the face of the company. And most of this is up to the booking of course. Having random Cody Rhodes singles matches like his Dominik Mysterio match at Money In The Bank 2023 or Crown Jewel 2023 against Damian Priest helped him feel more special. Especially in an era of WWE where PPV matches are much more protected.
This leads me to another reason why Seth doesn’t feel like a big star to me, his promos. He’s got his catchphrases like everyone else and he’s got some gimmicks like the crowd sing-a-long and for a few years there that awful cackle. But when it comes to the actual content of what he’s talking about, to me it mostly feels shallow. Again, there’s always the caveat of interference from the writers but I feel like it doesn’t count here as much since they clearly treat him on a similar level to a Cody, Punk, and Roman and they’ve all showed much more depth.
Let’s use the Rollins vs Punk feud as an example. I really anticipated this feud when Punk returned since that interview Rollins did when Punk was still in AEW where he called him a “cancer”. I thought there was genuine heat there so when Punk returned I knew they’d work something out and be pros but assumed they’d be able to squeeze a lot more heat out of it. Instead, they just ran a tepid version of the Drew McIntyre feud. In all the promo battles I felt neither guy had anything super interesting to say about the other. Seth narrowed in on the fact that Punk declined to train him when he was in the indies and Seth’s always held a grudge because of that. Meanwhile, Punk just tried to big time him. Ok but, what else? You guys are going to have a bunch of matches together and basically a year-long feud and that’s all?
They needed to go deeper on the fact that Punk used to be Seth Rollins. He used to be the workhorse who didn’t feel like The Guy. Then he left and came back almost 10 years later and because of that now felt like The Guy. Meanwhile, Rollins did everything right. He stayed, kept grinding, and was WWE’s number one soldier yet he’s still in the same spot. Explore how this unfairness and jealousy is driving Rollins’ grudge against Punk. And because they didn’t touch on this, the feud felt pretty generic and not interesting enough to justify such a long rivalry.
This has happened with quite a few of Rollins’ feuds. Maybe his focus is more on the in-ring but if was able to zero in on his promos and character he’d be able to get people more invested on the in-ring. It just feels like Rollins is constantly dancing around what the hook and core of his character is. He’s the model employee who does everything right who’s underappreciated. He deserves the promotion but it never comes. He has to watch others surpass him when they did things the unconventional and “wrong” way. Everyone can relate to this as it’s genuinely unfair and makes you feel sorry for the guy. Leverage that empathy to make him a babyface or have him be bitter to make him a heel. It’s perfect. But, instead he overstuffs his character with bells and whistles like the cackle, the song, the catchphrases, and the outfits.
This lack of depth to his character helps to explain why The Vision flopped so hard. Apart from it being WWE just trying to do The Bloodline again for some reason, The Vision was so dull and caused me to lose a lot of interest in the weekly product. What made The Bloodline and The Judgement Day so good was the clearly defined characters of each member and their emotional depth. The Vision had none of that. Instead, all it had was Seth Rollins and Paul Heyman playing the hits each week instead of building something new and long-lasting.
It’s really interesting to me though how he pretty much always has a storyline. Especially now that Triple H is in charge. Triple H’s affection for Rollins is well-known and many people have touched on how similar their careers are, both being the guy who worked with The Guy. This suggests that Rollins is some kind of self-insert for Triple H, where he books Rollins how he wishes that Vince booked him. So, that’s why Rollins always has a storyline.
However, I think the reason’s a little different. Of course, he’s actually a big star so they’d be silly not to give him stuff to do. But in the last year he’s seemed to have more going on for him than the actual guy Cody Rhodes. I think it’s because they use these storylines as bells and whistles to keep the crowd interested in Rollins. But, they’re not interested in him, they’re interested in the story or the gimmick or whatever it is. And that’s why when he doesn’t have something going on like in his brief feud with Bronson Reed, the crowd doesn’t care about him, instead cheering for Bronson Reed to continue beating him up.
Let me be more specific about what I mean by these extra storyline bells and whistles. Most recently, it’s this masked man gimmick. Crowds are pretty much always going to pop for a mystery attacker and an unmasking so they’ve given this to Rollins as a way to make him feel like a bigger deal and ensure bigger pops. Before that he had The Vision and was the focus of RAW. Before that he was pretty much shoehorned into the triple threat with CM Punk and Roman Reigns. Before that he was pretty much shoehorned into the WrestleMania 40 Night One Main Event. Now, while his involvement in that one turned out to be pretty great, the Mania 41 involvement always felt forced to me. I felt like the only reason he was in that match was because Triple H wanted to give Rollins something big to do at WrestleMania and couldn’t fit him anywhere else.
In short, Rollins is over and crowds react to him but those reactions more often come from the gimmicks or storylines he has rather than actual investment that the audience has made into his character. Think about it, what is his character really? Try and sum it up. Delusional workhorse that says he’s helping the future of the business but is really only concerned with helping himself. That’s like most main event WWE heel characters. We dealt with so much of that same story with Mr McMahon and The Authority that it’s become tired and not very emotionally resonant. Like how can I relate that to my life?
There’s a lot of meat in his history to work with but as it’s presented on TV I feel that WWE creative and Seth Rollins have failed to concisely thread a satisfying narrative throughline that clearly defines his character and his role within the show. While this makes him very flexible and able to be positioned wherever needed on the show, I think it hurts his ability to be a big star and build genuine audience investment. If they zeroed in on the unique “always the bridesmaid” position he plays in relation to being the face of the company and used his workhorse nature to show some truth and value to what he says then I feel crowds would connect to him as a person, rather than connecting to his actions.