Pro wrestling is perhaps the cruelest sport of all to watch. While fans of baseball, football, basketball, hockey, or soccer teams may be long-suffering and dreaming of a championship, there are a million factors at play. Front-office ineptitude, injury, a free agent that doesn’t pan out, regression to the mean, and just straight-up the randomness of the universe when it comes to bad breaks and happenstance in a pivotal game or during a key play. In professional wrestling, there’s usually just one thing keeping your favorite from winning the big one: whether the person pulling the lever thinks it’s a good idea.
This is all just a longwinded way of saying that we all want our favorite wrestlers to be the world champ, maybe just one time. Your average fan will get apoplectic if you bring up the fact that Cesaro has never been a main event player. And of course, even if your fave makes it to the top of the mountain, there’s still grousing about the championship run not being done “correctly.” Seth Rollins, Kevin Owens, Bray Wyatt … take your pick, really.
ANYWAY, WWE just released a new Corey Graves-narrated video about five WWE wrestlers who could be future first-time world champions one day, and … well, just take a gander at who they’ve singled out.
Yep, that’s Samoa Joe, Sami Zayn, Cesaro, Shinsuke Nakamura, and Baron Corbin. Four of the biggest internet non-main event darlings you could ever hope to name, and Baron Corbin. (We here at Baron Corbin are extremely on the Barry C train, but we readily acknowledge that not everyone is.) The interesting thing is … well, that the video exists, obviously, but also that Corbin is the only person who gets the “when, not if” treatment here.
It’s entirely possible that every single one of these guys could end up with either a WWE Championship or Universal Championship run before all is said and done (not sure about “before the next WrestleMania”). The ones I’d bet on are Corbin and Nakamura, but I’d LOVE all five of these guys to get a turn. And heck, it’s probable that we’ll see a first-time world champ in the next year who isn’t even in this video. Aiden English, probably.
So there’s your Friday daydreaming all laid out for you. Enjoy your weekend, with visions of a Sami Zayn world title reign dancing in your head.
