When Bron Breakker stepped through the curtain at the top of WWE Raw, he looked the part of a Superstar ready to ascend to the top of the card and become the main event attraction he has been pushed to be since he first arrived in NXT.
Confident and befitting the World Heavyweight Championship draped over his shoulder, he looked like the unstoppable badass poised to take over the main event scene on Raw amid an injury to Seth Rollins that will keep him sidelined for an untold period of time.
Breakker demanded Raw general manager Adam Pearce say “please” in return for the title belt and was the standout of the show-opening segment. When it was announced that there would be a Battle Royal to determine who would face CM Punk at Saturday Night’s Main Event on November 1 for the world championship, it was a foregone conclusion it would be The Badass.
Then, he was pulled from the match by Pearce in retaliation and told by Paul Heyman that he needs to listen to him. In one short vignette, everything that looked possible at the start of the show was gone.
Breakker was, for the lack of a better term, neutered.
Worse yet, he never did pop back up. There was no post-match attack on Punk and Battle Royal winner Jey Uso. He did not seek revenge or reassert his dominance. He simply took the condescending pep talk from Heyman and called it a night.
It was a major fumble from WWE creatively, a missed opportunity to seize the momentum Breakker’s spear and attack on Rollins created last week and launch him into stardom. It is something the company has been hellbent on doing since the second-generation star debuted as the new face of NXT in 2022.
Instead, the company extinguished the all-important aura he walked into Monday’s show with courtesy of a single booking decision, opting instead to go with the Uso win to set up the Punk main event and keep the Bloodline saga at the forefront.
While there is no denying how excellent Uso’s work has been of late, or how hugely important the epic Bloodline story has been to the success of WWE since 2022, the chance to create a new legitimate main event star was right therefor the company, and it whiffed harder than Aaron Judge in the MLB playoffs.
Breakker will win the title eventually, probably right on schedule because if there is one thing we have learned about Triple H as WWE chief content officer, it’s that he does not love going off-schedule when it comes to milestone creative decisions.
There are probably huge plans for Breakker’s eventual coronation, but there are only so many missed opportunities one can have before it bites back. And WWE had one staring it in the face Monday, but the company missed the mark and failed the 27-year-old.
Listening to Heyman may fit what Triple H and Co. want to accomplish, but Breakker’s attack on Rollins was clearly not something The Oracle orchestrated.
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Allowing The Badass to be a step ahead of the Hall of Famer and prove he has the intelligence and instinct to not need Heyman’s cunning would have been a nice change of pace and elevated him to the level of a Rollins or Reigns, both of whom needed The Oracle’s advice and strategy.
Instead, Breakker is like everyone else and will need to be heated back up after a week that saw him inexplicably cooled off by those who should have been jumping to present him not as the next big thing, but the big thing now.