Dolph Ziggler's Days of Losing Are Not over
Dolph Ziggler is now the World Heavyweight champion, and in a perfect world, that would mean that he is going to receive a strong push going forward.
As we all know, though, the WWE is far from perfect, and what should happen often doesn’t. That concept applies to anybody and everything, including its champions and biggest stars—including Dolph Ziggler.
What should happen with Ziggler during his reign as World Heavyweight champion is that he constantly picks up big victories over established stars and fellow up-and-comers, holds the title for at least six months and emerges from his championship reign as one of the WWE’s biggest and brightest stars.
But what will happen? In all likelihood, his days of losing will continue.
For several months leading up to his Money in the Bank cash-in and World title victory, all Ziggler did was lose. He lost tag matches. He lost singles matches. He lost to midcarders. He lost to main eventers. He lost to everyone.
Then, he became the World Heavyweight champion, and—guess what?—nothing changed.
A mere one week after he won the World title, Ziggler faced Jack Swagger in a non-title match on Raw, and in true WWE fashion, he lost that match—cleanly, I might add. This was, of course, a mind-boggling move by the WWE to have its World champion lose so soon after becoming the champion, but it wasn’t a surprising one, nonetheless.
Losing is what heels do in the WWE, and even when they do win, the company finds a way to make sure that they don’t look strong even in victory. That’s also what has unfortunately happened to Ziggler since he won the title.
The notable victories he has picked up—like his ones over Chris Jericho—weren’t clean ones. Rather, they were tainted ones in which Ziggler enlisted the help of Big E Langston and/or A.J. Lee to help him get the victory or lucked out thanks to an interruption by Fandango.
That’s one of the biggest reasons why many are clamoring for Ziggler to go solo. As long as he has Langston and Lee there to help him when he needs it, odds are that he’s always going to be a heel who cheats, rather than outwrestles, his opponents to beat them.
It’s also one of the main reasons why—despite winning the World Heavyweight title just a couple of weeks ago—Ziggler is bound to continue his losing ways.
After all, the WWE has recently made a really bad habit out of consistently booking its champions to lose non-title matches. Most notably, both Wade Barrett and Antonio Cesaro recently had horribly booked midcard title reigns that were defined largely by the absurd number of non-title matches that they lost.
These two lost non-title matches on a weekly basis, and now, look what’s happened to them. Cesaro is stuck with a yodeling gimmick as the WWE’s newest “jobber to the stars” while Barrett is now in his third reign as one of the worst intercontinental champions in recent memory.
No one really cared about either guy as their title reigns went on because they lost what seemed like 90 percent of their matches, and now, we find Ziggler stuck in a similar situation.
Obviously, Ziggler is a tremendous talent, but that certainly doesn’t mean that he’s guaranteed to get the long, well-booked title reign he deserves. In fact, he isn’t guaranteed anything as World Heavyweight champion.
Well, maybe he is.
Based purely on Ziggler’s recent past and the WWE’s recent trend of booking its heel champions to consistently lose, the safe bet is that Ziggler will lose just as much as World Heavyweight champion as he has over the last year—and that’s a lot.
Ziggler is so fantastic at making his opponents look good that it has almost become his biggest drawback. Just because he’s now holding a World title, that doesn’t mean that will change. At all.
It’s in the WWE’s nature to make heels lose, regardless of how talented they are or if the most logical scenario is to have them win.
The most logical scenario here is for Ziggler to rack up win after win after win. But if logic always won out, Ziggler would have never lost so much in the first place.
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