Well the cat’s out of the bag, apparently. As this past edition of SmackDown came to a close, Roman Reigns confronted Buddy Murphy, one of the internet’s prime suspects for the incidents that have been threatening Roman’s life. After Buddy initially denied knowing anything, Roman roughed him up until he started to talk. WWE’s Best Kept Secret revealed that it was none other than… Rowan.
Not Daniel Bryan, atleast as far as he knew. He just saw Rowan. Cut to Bryan and Rowan, who just happened to be in the ring as this went down, looking concerned.
Now of course, Rowan is likely to have been working on Bryan’s behalf. He has been subservient to him thus far after all and Daniel Bryan has been teasing… something, for a while now without a hint of delivering. He obviously had some kind of plan, whether WWE themselves even knew what it was at the time or not. So it’s probably a little presumptuous to say that ‘ol Redbeard did this of his own volition. Especially since they put this revelation at the very end of the show before anything more could be elaborated. In some way, it’s still a mystery going into SummerSlam, but one we pretty much know will be resolved on Sunday.
So… what exactly will be going down here?
There’s no question in my mind that SummerSlam will involve Roman Reigns calling out the former SmackDown Live Tag Team Champions and demanding an explanation. And that will almost definitely end up turning into a match of some fashion. Maybe Roman will flat out end up against Rowan one-on-one but I don’t know if I see them doing that.
Even if the ultimate idea of the pairing with Bryan was to let Rowan break out as a singles star, and mind you there probably is something to that, having him immediately go against Roman does not seem like the best idea. I mean it’s almost inconceivable that they would have him just jump straight to beating Reigns. But having him take that L would hardly be the way to start a run.
It’s certainly still possible that Bryan ends up taking full credit and the two of them have a one-on-one. That’s certainly what I would prefer from a match quality standpoint, I’d love to see them square off on a big stage.
But Rowan seemingly has a huge role to play here, so he kinda should be involved in the match itself, right? That leaves us with the option of a tag match forming. But then, who would team with Roman…?
Strangely, one ogical choice seems to be… Samoa Joe.
Joe and Roman have been feuding of late, but they’ve also brought up their shared Samoan heritage a lot, hinting that their ilk are meant to stick together. Joe was even in the process of hunting down Roman when he suffered that hit and run. But when it happened, he was genuinely concerned, as though this had gone too far.
Joe was also unhappy about how much his name had been dragged through the mud from supposed accusations directed towards him. And when Roman appeared on SmackDown, he took the time to apologize to him for that.
If nothing else, it’d be reasonable that he’d want a piece of the real culprits. So a one-night teaming would make sense. Whether Roman could actually trust Joe in the end is another story entirely…
