The Royal Rumble is upon us! I’m Jordan Huie of the Overtimer and I’ve been running down all the favorites to win both the Men’s and Women’s Royal Rumble matches! And we’re almost done now, just one left for each, which means…! …Sigh. Which means, now is the time where I talk about Shayna Baszler.
Shayna Baszler – Relevant Stats
- WWE Debut: 2019 (Debuted in NXT in 2017)
- First Rumble appearance: N/A
- She has never won a Rumble match.
- This would be her first Rumble appearance.
- She has amassed zero total eliminations.
- She has never held the Raw or SmackDown Women’s titles.
- Current betting odds: -250 (Odds-on favorite)
How 2019 Went For Shayna Baszler:
The last two full years of NXT’s existence has been spent with Shayna Baszler choking the very life out of the entire division, both literally and figuratively. As an influx of remarkably more interesting and talented women continued to appear below her, there she stood, an effective bottleneck. A limiter, a living cap on the quality and interest any given NXT Women’s Title match could possibly have throughout all of both 2018 and 2019. We had Asuka/Ember Moon as our main feud until Shayna Baszler happened. She just, happened, to NXT. She’s only just now stopped happening, atleast in theory.
Part of me still struggles to believe that she won’t still end being a part of TakeOver: Portland, and increase her streak of consecutive TakeOvers where she was involved in the women’s title match to eleven. If Portland does indeed go down without her, then there will have been exactly 851 days between then and TakeOver: WarGames 2017, the last time such a thing occurred. In every show between those two, she’s been there, ensuring two star matches. Taking a title that once regularly outshone everything else on the card and made you scratch your head wondering why it wasn’t the main event, and turning it’s every defense into, routinely, the worst match on the show. I think she’s been there so long that people have actually forgotten how much better this used to be.
There is no need to discuss this in any further detail because at no point has it ever really been any different. Only the names change. Or rather, one of them does.
Oh yeah, also she was a part of NXT’s war with Raw and SmackDown and during this she teased the hell out of a feud with Becky Lynch.
Where does that leave her chances? / What would her story be?
She’s the odds-on favorite. Because, as I mentioned, she not only teased a feud with Becky, but also won a triple threat match that Lynch was involved in. She submitted Bayley to keep things ambiguous as to who would win between her and Becky, which really just makes the match all the more likely. For that reason, I think it makes sense to combine these two categories, as the story is pretty closely tied to why everyone’s talking about her.
That, and, she’s finally been dethroned after holding the NXT Women’s title for what felt like my entire life. So it’s sure as hell time for her to move on from the brand. Please. Seriously. Let her win and have her be Raw and SmackDown Women’s Champion simultaneously for the rest of her career. I don’t mind. Just… just get her off of NXT, please.
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