Another edition of WWE Friday Night SmackDown is ahead of us tonight and you can expect the same coverage as always, including live recaps and results, plus a preview of everything that’s to come! For Daniel Bryan standards, his angles have been quiet of late. Since his feud with the Fiend concluded at the Royal Rumble, he’s been basically having fun doing whatever he works and wrestling with whomever he wants. That’s really the only thing that explains his feud and subsequent team up with Drew Gulak. I’ve really liked it but that’s largely because of just how weirdly un-WWE the whole thing has been. It was maybe the lowest possible profile thing for Bryan to do immediately following a world title feud, but it’s certainly been working out pretty well. It then led pretty naturally into Bryan and Gulak feuding with Sami Zayn’s Artist Collective and thus Bryan challenging for Sami’s Intercontinental Championship.
It was pretty easy to assume that Bryan was going to be taking the title at WrestleMania for a few reasons.
Sami has been presented as basically a non-wrestler for nearly a year now, which makes him holding a title pretty weird, and indeed in the match itself this was only mildly scaled back on. It was the conclusion of a lengthy stretch in which no one had ever managed to get their hands on Sami so at the very least we all knew it was time for him to take a beating, and that he did. And WWE has kinda wanted to park the IC title on Daniel Bryan for a long time, it just fits at this stage of his career. Atleast the way WWE tends to look at him anyway. He’d be a very strong secondary champion, one that could theoretically headline house shows if need be, and seeing him with the gold would harken back to the days of the belt being known as the workhorse title.
But it was not to be, and now it’s kind of interesting to see where that’s going. For now though, it looks like Bryan’s focus might be shifting a bit. He’s still facing off with one of Sami’s boys in Cesaro but it’s for a Money In The Bank qualifier instead. It makes me wonder if perhaps the long term plan is to have Gulak take the IC title off of Sami instead… it certainly wouldn’t be weird to see Gulak challenging at MITB if nothing else. Meanwhile Bryan is in the Men’s Money In The Bank ladder match instead. Makes sense to me. Daniel Bryan over, in that case. And also any case, realistically speaking…
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