The Heel Report: 09.25.13: Cul-de-sac of Disappointment

This is the Heel Report. A weekly chart spanning from Tuesday’s NXT to next Monday’s Raw, ranking the heels in professional wrestling based on their actions, wins and losses.

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’.

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: Randy Orton

Orton channelled his inner Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, at least for a few seconds anyway as he talked about ‘scorched earth’ in his promo on Smackdown. It was only a small explanation as to why he is now the Viper of old again, at least appears to be, but it was enough to suffice.

Sure we don’t really know why a cold-blooded competitor like Orton would start to want to garner any kind of reaction like Cena in the first-place, but if they are playing up the idea now that he wants to be ‘the face of the WWE’ then retroactively it makes sense that when he was champion before he wanted the same thing, and just didn’t really know how to act the part. Hell who even wants the part? Cena gets booed more than most heels, some face eh? Anyway I am glad that Orton has become more vicious in his matches, but you do have to wonder just how vicious he can be in this PG climate, I wonder if his match at Battleground will be any indication.

2nd Place: Ryback

There’s nothing I love more than a hypocrite, maybe that explains a few things, anyway Big Hungry stood tall for the most part over the hometown hero of C.M. Punk, and now the two will have a match at Battleground. Since this rivalry is really a continuation of the Punk-Heyman feud I wouldn’t mind if there was a stipulation, despite my protests to the same thing happening last year with the same two competitors.

But then that was a Hell in a Cell match and for the WWE title so to me there is a gulf of difference between the stakes and atmosphere that such a match will create. I’m not really sure how the Ryback got to this high position on the chart but I guess it was just a slow week and nothing really bad happened to the guy, which says a little something about the flaws in the next entry on the chart…

3rd Place: Dixie Carter

This could have been a great promo; with an admittedly unexpected heel turn, a new authority figure taking charge, AJ Styles being put in his place, and just like with HHH’s latest turn a new figure for the locker room to unite against, there is one problem though…Dixie Carter can’t deliver a promo for shit. It doesn’t help that AJ had just delivered another ‘shoot’ promo where it was really hard for the audience to tell if he was trying to be a heel or a face with how snarky he was being.

Because of this when Dixie came out I think a lot of people in the crowd saw her as the face and him as the heel, so when she began to attempt to give him a dressing down they thought they were supposed to be cheering and the whole thing came across as confused and really, amateur compared to the monumental moment for the company that it should have been. Still there is promise in this turn since we have never seen heel Dixie before, on the other hand every time we have seen her she has proven that she has absolutely zero charisma and doesn’t belong on camera, so we will just have to wait and see if this turn can be maintained after its initial momentum, which I’m pretty sure would have landed her the top of the chart had it been better in its delivery.

4th Place: Bully Ray

The other major bad guy in the company had a further falling out with his club this week as we get move closer to Bound For Glory. I really don’t know how I feel about the ‘club’ dissolving so close to the event. On the one hand it now cannot be AJ vs. the Aces & 8s, and after over a year of ‘we have to stop this darn group’, the whole thing seems to have gone out with more of a whimper than the bang that should have been AJ triumphant against the President to the point of destroying the group.

On the other hand despite the company’s attempts it never really felt like AJ had any real beef with the group outside of his own petty bullshit so I’m not sure how satisfying the big win would have been anyway had the group still been together. The only real sticking point then for me is how a week after the group chose Bully over Anderson they have now turned their backs on him after surely realising that he was all about himself from the outset. In the end though the group’s only half decent members had already left anyway over the last few months so why not kill the group now rather than have it limp on in the shambles it has become.

5th Place: HHH

Last week someone in the comments asked if HHH could even still be counted as a heel, and I come back with a resounding; Yes! While the Game certainly is playing up the idea that he is a fair boss who is just trying to do what is best for business and simply reacts to things like a man running a multi-million dollar, publically traded company, which he basically is so there is nothing wrong with that logic, he is also playing things with a clear level of malevolence underneath all of his reasoning.

Just because a person smiles to your face doesn’t mean they aren’t readying a knife to stab you in the back, and that is clearly what HHH is doing to everyone who sides with Daniel Bryan. As it is his fake nice-guy act is slightly hurting his point accumulation, but his passive-aggressive style still earns him some despite the words themselves seeming to be anti-inflammatory.

6th Place: The Shield

The group took the position of the sacrificial lambs this week, first taking on eleven fresh men in a gauntlet match on Smackdown, which had them almost lose after only half the competitors had come out, and then actually lose later in the night in a straight six-man tag match. Then on Raw the three men were seen to be punished in a three-on-eleven handicap match in the main event, where while they performed well throughout, they eventually lost to the baby face force that is Daniel Bryan. The thing that sets Bryan’s wins apart from Cena’s are that they are much more believable, they either come in straight matches, or somewhere like here where while he himself didn’t cheat, events had transpired as to where you could see Bryan triumphant overall.

The WWE have been very smart here in their booking of Daniel Bryan, if this were Cena then he would have just straight up beaten the group in several three-on-one handicap matches while single-handedly saving the rest of the locker room from their assaults on a weekly basis. Roman Reigns was handed his first loss on tv and yet still looked dominant throughout, and Rollins and Ambrose managed to look good despite losing their muscle from the equation. As of now I am not sure how else the WWE could have booked the group better, it has been almost a year since their debut and not only are they still going strong, but they are a force to be beaten in the company so much to where if a commentator says that it would be a big deal for someone like Ziggler or Kofi to beat Ambrose for the US title it does not sound ludicrous, despite their relatively wide experience gap in the WWE.

7th Place: Alberto Del Rio

The world champ will almost certainly retain his gold at Battleground due to RVD’s impending contract expiration, and yet it would seem strange as to think who will go up against Del Rio at Hell in a Cell, unless the title isn’t contested inside the cell of course.

What I wouldn’t mind happening is RVD beating Del Rio, and then Del Rio taking him out, allowing Sandow to cash in and creating a multi-man match at the event, hopefully in a cell since I loved the six-man cell held at Armageddon, although I have no real clue who would challenge for the title in that match but nevermind.

8th Place: Paul Heyman

You have to admire how Heyman baited Punk in on Monday night, as well as how Punk saw through it and tried to attack him anyway.

The feud between the two has been a good one, but I think things should perhaps come to a close at Hell in a Cell, I’m not sure how or with who yet, but if this thing doesn’t last until Survivor Series then I would like it to come to a head in a big specialty match, since while team Heyman vs. team Punk doesn’t sound all that bad, team Corporation vs. team Bryan is probably the better choice should the WWE decide to only hold one traditional Survivor Series match this year.

9th Place: Stephanie McMahon

So apparently the Big Show is just Stephanie McMahon’s big KOing lapdog now, which I’m not sure how I feel about. Still I like that in having both HHH and Stephanie in charge they can play the whole ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine with HHH trying to be fair and then Stephanie coming out and being a complete bitch, and the reverse happening on occasion as well.

You had to like her promo against the Miz this week, cutting his career down to the bone, a lot of the McMahon-Helmsley promos have been borderline shoots, its only that it doesn’t seem so groundbreaking when it is the establishment giving home-truths to the wrestlers, but it does make things more real and justifies the motivations of the rebelling superstars all the more, I just hope this whole angle continues to build up steam as we head towards Survivor Series and beyond.

10th Place: E.G.O.

Personally I am not that much of a fan of this whole E.G.O. vs. M.E.M. situation going on. While I am glad the team won on Impact and I know it makes some sense considering it is three-on-three right now and all the men need something to do for Bound for Glory, it still doesn’t really make sense to me from a storyline basis. After all E.G.O. was founded to rule the BFG Series, which lasted for a couple of weeks and then all went tits up, so why are they still together now that the series has finished? I know that Bad Influence helped Roode out during his match with Magnus and that was nice of them, but from the way I see those characters it is more likely that they would be all like ‘see ya, bye’ once the series had come to a close.

Then there is the Main Event Mafia, which to be fair never really made sense to begin with in its second incarnation since it was Sting being left high and dry and resorting to…making a group consisting of all those said men who left him high and dry, one of which not really even qualifying for M.E.M. status, and there main focus was the demolishing of Aces & 8s, which is already happening from the inside and the only actual elimination performed by the group was at the hands of AJ Styles, who is a non-group member for some reason. The whole thing is just messed up in terms of story, but in terms of match quality I’m betting it will be great; so typical TNA business as usual then.

(Week 011)

1. Randy Orton (54)

2. Bully Ray (50)

3. HHH (48)

4. AJ Lee (42)

5. Paul Heyman (38)

6. Ryback (38)

7. Alberto Del Rio (38)

8. Dean Ambrose (36)

9. Damien Sandow (25)

10. Bray Wyatt (25)

Heel Centurions:

That’s all for this week, Bully Ray and Randy Orton are still battling it out for top heel on the Rolling Chart and I think both men’s impending title matches will go a long way in deciding who pulls ahead. However there is certainly still enough in it for someone else to pull ahead and surpass both men while they are still the main heel focuses of their respective companies. So which are you more excited for; Battleground or Bound for Glory? TNA will finally be putting on another actual PPV, but will it live up to the hype? Or will it be just lie Night of Champions and feel like a slightly extended and over-priced version of the usual free product? Either way come back next week for more heel rankings and for now this is James Wright signing off.