Roman Reigns Isn’t Daniel Bryan & Never Will Be

Daniel Bryan was the B+ Player. Roman Reigns is The Big Dog. That is as stark of a contrast as you can possibly get.

Daniel Bryan has steadily been cheered for the majority of his career, whereas Roman Reigns has had a split crowd that has gotten more and more lukewarm to him over time, to a point where you’re flat out more likely to hear boos than cheers now.

Everybody has said it for years: he needs to become a heel, so WWE can turn into the skid and make it into a positive. Somehow, after years of this, the company remains too stubborn to do that, and it’s oddly being paralleled just the same with Rusev’s cheers and their refusal to turn him babyface.

Insisting on booing Rusev hasn’t been working, just as insisting on cheering Reigns has been a failed experiment for over three years, and the very last thing WWE should want to do is try to bring Bryan into the mix, as that will only further the disconnect and showcase who the WWE Universe truly is behind in comparison.

As a fan of Reigns, it pains me to be saying these points time and time again, as I feel like it isn’t his fault. The people responsible for booking him are the ones creating this problem and digging the whole deeper and deeper every week.

First, he was booked as the next John Cena—something that any historian would know isn’t the best multi-year strategy, based off the split crowds Cena erupted—and now that that isn’t panning out, the plan to make him the next Daniel Bryan is failing even more miserably.

Tune in to WWE in 2019 to see Roman’s storyline after this, which will be “the next CM Punk” where he speaks in pipe bomb promos and breaks the fourth wall, and in 2020 when he’s “the next Undertaker” and starts using all the other gimmicks instead of just stealing the phrase “it’s my yard.”

Both Daniel Bryan and Roman Reigns have so much to offer, but they are entirely different people with entirely different strengths and weaknesses, so the same strategies can’t work with a carbon copy template.

If that were the case, WWE would have never stopped pumping out Hulk Hogan clones to ever give us a Shawn Michaels, a Steve Austin, a Rock, a Triple H or any other big name.

WWE needs to let Roman Reigns be “Roman Reigns” first and foremost, not “the top babyface”. Until then, all the fans are going to see when they look at him is not The Guy, but “the guy WWE wants to be the top babyface”—a character Daniel Bryan never was.

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