It’s one of the most exciting times of the wrestling year everyone. The 2020 Royal Rumble is soon to be upon us. A longstanding tradition, which sees 30 competitors (once apiece it’s actually been 40 and 50 but these are quite the aberrations) vie for a shot at a big time title match at WrestleMania. It’s high stakes, as serious as can be. And yet there’s also a real sense of fun and wonder every time too, striking a nice balance between two extremes. It’s always a thrill, wondering who will be the next entrant? And it’s a tradition that was doubled as of 2018, with the women getting a Rumble match of their own. A top level achievement for top level ladies like Charlotte Flair!
This is the second in a mini-series, which you will be seeing throughout the week. I’m always doing previews of upcoming shows, match-by-match, but something like the Royal Rumble deserves a bit of a deep dive. So I’m gonna make sure I give a very thorough look at all the possibilities. To that end, I’m looking at twenty of the favorites for this Sunday’s extravaganza. In other words, ten for the men and women apiece! One-by-one, I’ll be analyzing their chances of winning, and what the story to their victory might be.
While I’ve selected nine for both sides on my own, the last picks will be yours! Check out this page for more details and be sure to vote on who you’d like to see covered that isn’t already listed! As for this page, I’ll start by looking at what kind of year Charlotte Flair is coming off of.
Charlotte Flair – Relevant Stats
- WWE Debut: 2015 (Debuted in NXT in 2012)
- First Rumble appearance: 2019
- She has never won a Rumble match before.
- This will be her second Royal Rumble appearance.
- She is a four-time Raw Women’s Champion, five-time SmackDown Women’s Champion and one-time Divas Champion.
- She has amassed four total eliminations in her Rumble history.
- Current betting odds: +500
How 2019 Went For Charlotte Flair:
This is actually sort of interesting question with Charlotte. She won the SmackDown Women’s title three times this past year and yet, all three reigns are very easily forgotten. And in spite of this, she had what might be considered a pretty bad run last year for anyone. For someone of her lofty standards, it was actually kind of atrocious. Let me explain.
See, Charlotte Flair has recently been making headlines… for having the worst win/loss percentage going of any active star. And the thing is, that’s almost entirely because of 2019. According to the ever-reliable cagematch.net, Charlotte’s record last year was 35 wins and 100 losses. This amounts to losing almost 72% of her 139 matches. For comparison, in 2018 that record was 84 wins to 42 losses. She’s more than doubled her number of defeats.
What really makes that striking to me is that she spent most of last year as a pretty clear babyface, more so than what seems to be the norm for her. And usually babyfaces get their stats padded by house shows rather than dwindled. Generally speaking on non-televised events, babyfaces win way more often than they lose. But apparently that didn’t help Charlotte out in the slightest bit.
Now let’s go back and look at those three title wins.
These stats seem truly crazy for someone who won one of her division’s premiere titles three times in that same span, but in context it’s not so crazy. See, she did beat Asuka – kinda out of nowhere as I recall – in March of 2019 for the SmackDown Women’s Championship. However she did so purely to make the impending triple threat between herself, Becky Lynch and Ronda Rousey into a double title bout. It was the first time women were ever headlining WrestleMania and there was a stark need to make it into a big a match as possible.
While being part of this at all is a huge thing for Charlotte, ultimately she was a bit of a third wheel. Her involvement was actually something of a safety net. WWE wanted to make damn sure that Rousey’s inexperience wasn’t going to crop up on that grand stage. Having both Charlotte and Becky there helped to ensure the match would stay strong. In the end, the result had nothing to do with Charlotte as Becky pinned Rousey for the victory.
This did position Charlotte well to go after Becky afterwards though, and she did defeat her to regain the title at Money In The Bank, in Becky’s second match of the night granted… only to lose it to Bayley mere moments later. Her win was stolen largely to foreshadow Bayley’s impending heel turn.
Charlotte Flair then stopped to feud with a legend.
While I’m mostly wanting to talk about her title situations, it’d be a crime to gloss over her dream match with Trish Stratus. She took on one of the all-time greats on a big stage at SummerSlam 2019. And for what it was, I thought it was a really good match, just a special feeling seeing the two of them against one another. Ultimately, Charlotte ended up notching a win over one of – if not the – most famous women’s wrestler of all time. Given the aforementioned third wheel status she had in the Mania main event, I’d argue this was the highlight of her year.
She did then follow that up by continuing her feud with Bayley and once again, she managed to wrestle the SmackDown Women’s title away from her on PPV… only to then drop it right back to her later that same week. This was done largely just to punctuate Bayley’s metamorphosis into the character she is now. She sunk deeper into her heel persona with a makeover that night, and beating Charlotte to regain the title gave this a bit more gravitas. Once again, Charlotte’s own title victory was not even done for her sake. None of these three were.
I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, they did atleast have some purpose. And for Charlotte it does pad her out nicely to help solidify her record of title wins. There’s always been an underlying idea that she’ll eventually amass as many women’s championships as her dad had world championships. But still the way it was done in 2019 makes it clear that it just wasn’t really her year. Those three reigns altogether combined for 18 days. So uh, if you didn’t recall any of them, that’d be why.
Charlotte Flair closed out the year by teaming with one of her archrivals.
This was atleast a pretty cool story. Charlotte and Becky Lynch’s hatred for one another was well established, but the two of them ran into a mutual threat in the form of the Kabuki Warriors. Neither of them could handle them alone so they formed a begrudging partnership to try and take them on together. The result was a Women’s Tag Title TLC match that ended up headlining the last year PPV of the decade. But in the end, the Kabukis retained.
So where does that leave her Rumble chances?
It can be easy to rationalize some doom and gloom for Charlotte after this past year. And certainly some of those statistics are pretty shocking. But let’s be honest, none of this has really damaged her image much. And that’s why they were comfortable booking her like this. Somewhere along the way, Charlotte Flair reached a point of being somewhat bulletproof. I don’t know that I can say she’d survive any kind of bad booking, but it’s gonna be pretty hard to knock her down the pecking order in any significant way.
Since joining the main roster less than five years ago, she’s amassed ten women’s title victories with three different championships. This is in addition to being one of the most significant NXT Women’s Champions in that title’s history. She is firmly one of the most accomplished women’s wrestlers… ever! Of any time period, of any promotion, anywhere in the world. There’s no caveats needed on that.
So, ultimately none of that means much. They booked her that way knowing damn well they can push her to the moon again whenever they want and it’ll work out just fine. Meaning she can totally win the Rumble this year, and is reasonably going to be one of the favorites to win any given year after it, as long as she sticks around.
That is the rub, though.
In my personal opinion, one of the more juicy headlines of 2019 (and think of the ground that covers!) was when Charlotte Flair and her now-fiancee Andrade filed for some curious trademarks. They both registered new ringnames that they clearly are not about to use in WWE. This fanned a lot of speculation that the two of them could be planning to jump together in the near future. Of course Andrade was in a much worse spot at the time this happened, his fortunes have since picked up a good bit as he’s currently the United States Champion. For Charlotte though, very little has changed.
And in general, it’s not too hard to see why she might be interested in exploring other options. If for no other reason than because she doesn’t have much left to do in WWE. She’s won a bazillion titles and is one of three women on the planet who can say they’ve main evented WrestleMania. And now Becky Lynch has emerged as the ace of the women’s division, basically taking Charlotte’s former spot and it’s hard to imagine her losing it any time soon. That means that there are precious few carrots left to dangle for her.
Although one thing she has yet to do is win the Royal Rumble… so hey, there’s that. It’s hard to really say what her contract status is right now, if it’s even up for renewal anytime soon or what have you. This really isn’t the article for that. But if there’s any doubt at all that she’s staying put, needless to say that affects her chances. Otherwise she’s as likely a pick as anyone though.
What would her story be?
If Charlotte does end up taking the win, I imagine she’d challenge Becky Lynch. While this bout has been done to death, there’s good reason for that. It’s extremely reliable in terms of quality, and most of the time it’s the biggest match they can do in the women’s division.
Beyond that, there is an angle to play here. Charlotte was the one unpinned at WrestleMania in the triple threat last year. With Ronda Rousey now out of the equation, Charlotte and Becky can focus on one another to see who the true greatest active wrestler in their division today is.
