The 2020 WWE Royal Rumble is tonight everybody! It’s one of the biggest nights of the year every year for a wrestling fan! Jordan Huie of the Overtimer here and as always I’ll be covering the event as it happens, as well as handling all the previews for the show! But the Rumble matches needed something a little special I thought. So I’ve been doing this mini-series detailing all the favorites to win! Ten for the men and ten for the women! I don’t have a ton of time left so let’s get these things finished! Right now, we look at… well, a divisive name to say the least in King Corbin!
King Corbin – Relevant Stats
- WWE Debut: 2016 (Debuted in NXT in 2012)
- First Rumble appearance: 2017
- He has never won a Rumble match.
- This will be his fifth Rumble appearance. (Includes Greatest Royal Rumble)
- He has amassed seven total eliminations.
- He has never been world champion.
- Current betting odds: +4000
How 2019 Went For King Corbin:
Great, for better or worse. I mean, he started the year as a complete and utter joke, having just been bested by Braun Strowman who, wasn’t even cleared to wrestle thanks to his shattered arm. And yet all the henchmen in the world couldn’t win him that feud to close out 2018. WWE then blamed Corbin for the decline in ratings, given how heavily featured he was in his silly position as Stephanie McMahon’s Personally Appointed Constable Of Raw. They removed him from his position going into the year, but then… a funny thing happened. He actually continued being the Constable, just without his title.
The first half of 2019 makes considerably more sense if you just assume Corbin was still in power.
That’s why he was Kurt Angle’s final opponent at WrestleMania in the first place, not because Angle chose it but because Corbin booked himself in that spot. And after beating Angle in his only real notable victory in a full calendar year, he went on to go after Seth Rollins’ Universal Championship. And even though he was soundly beaten in these matches time and again, and Rollins decimated him from pillar to post each week proving that he was in no way a threat to him and he had zero credibility as a challenger, he just kept getting title match after title match for no reason whatsoever.
Again, this makes sense if you consider that he was planned to still be the authority figure at the time it was happening. The reason he got those matches is because he was meant to be booking himself in them. But because of WWE’s stupid meaningless lip service promising change, we couldn’t acknowledge that. Similarly, this would explain why he kept finding henchmen to help him out, with the likes of Drew McIntyre, Elias, Bobby Lashley and others siding with Corbin… kinda for the hell of it. This would’ve made sense if he was the boss, as obviously the heels would want to curry his favor.
Few things truly encapsulate how dumb WWE thinks it’s audience is than the summer of 2019.
They just, assumed people would be okay with this. They figured no one would notice if they just acted like he was a commissioner without him having the title. All they really did was remove any justification his angles would’ve otherwise had, and ended up featuring way MORE than the year before instead of less, as they promised.
After Rollins finally thwarted Corbin, sacrificing his own good will in the process after that dead-end angle went way past it’s expiration date, Corbin disappeared for a bit. But he re-emerged in time to join the King of the Ring, a storied tournament brought back seemingly to honor Harley Race who had passed away earlier in the year. From here, King Corbin was christened, which began a feud with Chad Gable. Corbin’s continued poisoning of everything he touched turned Olympic-caliber-wrestler Chad Gable into wannabe-basketball-star Shorty G.
Then The Rock came and called him an STD and that gets chanted at him every now and again.
This all sounds bad, but a funny thing happened… I think for once, the KOTR actually gave someone some credibility.
It’s been the kiss of death for many, for whatever reason, as WWE have largely failed to capitalize on anyone’s momentum coming out of King Of The Ring. This same gimmick basically ended Wade Barrett’s career. But King Corbin seemed to take that cringiness just that little bit over the top enough to where… it seemed to work. Corbin’s feud with Roman Reigns which closed out 2019 and is still on-going now, hasn’t actually been turned on by live audiences. This is kind of a shock to me, considering how the Summer went. It’s kinda sad that this is proof of progress, but it definitely is to me.
He’s actually been somewhat protected since moving to SmackDown in the Draft and even has a big PPV win over Roman to his name, albeit with a ton of help. He’s still a joke villain in a way. Goofy, cringey. But it’s being played much more effectively now. He is, if nothing else, an easy guy to root against, which is always helpful for Roman.
So where does that leave his chances?
It’s very easy for me to see Corbin making a big impact in the Rumble. It wouldn’t shock me at all if here among the last guys there, perhaps even the last man eliminated. They will want to scare us into thinking Corbin might win. But he won’t. That’s my stance.
What would his story be?
One could only assume that, if King Corbin did win, Roman Reigns would beat the Fiend before Mania. But I really, really do not see that happening. It’d surely be stress testing how much people are actually into this angle to give it that kind of upgrade. And they’ve already been feuding since October so stretching it to April would really be overkill.
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