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Brock Lesnar and Bobby Lashley are two of WWE’s best booked stars. (Credit: Amer HILABI / AFP)
Brock Lesnar defeated Bobby Lashley in fluke fashion at WWE Crown Jewel in a booking decision that kept Lashley looking strong and likely sets up a rubber match but could also serve as a way for “The Beast” to reenter the world title picture.
That, however, shouldn’t happen.
Since returning to WWE in 2012, Lesnar has been synonymous with WWE’s top titles, whether it’s the WWE or Universal Championship. Over the course of that decade, Lesnar has won seven world titles despite coming and going on a regular basis and re-signing with WWE under different contracts for varying lengths of times.
Lesnar, of course, has long ranked among WWE’s highest paid stars, and given his popularity and his consistently strong in-ring performances, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Lesnar is still raking in massive paydays roughly two decades after making his WWE debut. As other WWE stars, like Bray Wyatt, have demonstrated, these top-tier performers are worth spending big money on when they’re bringing in that big money themselves through merchandise sales, ticket sales or other revenue streams.
What Lesnar has proven over the past year or two, though, is that being a world title contender or the actual world champion isn’t a necessity for a star of his caliber.
At Crown Jewel, Lesnar faced Lashley, a fellow colossal main eventer and uber-popular star who’s also at the height of his career, and it was disappointing short match that never truly got going. This marked the second time that the two behemoths clashed in 2022 alone, and their second encounter even fell short of their highly-criticized first match at the 2022 Royal Rumble in January.
That bout featured the typical Vince McMahon-booked shenanigans WWE fans had grown accustomed to, and even with Triple H now running WWE’s creative process, Lashley vs. Lesnar at Crown Jewel felt like a match that was a booker’s conundrum, with neither star in the position to suffer a loss. In an ideal world, Lashley—who is certainly around more often and has been an integral performer for WWE for the past few years—would have defeated Lesnar to pick up arguably the biggest and most important win of his career.
But Lesnar, after suffering some big losses as of late, emerged with the victory, which shows that he isn’t going to simply fall off the map under Triple H. The build to Lesnar’s match against Lashley, however, was a promising sign of things to come.
This, after all, was a rare non-title match for Lesnar, who has spent most of the past decade either holding a world title or challenging for it. That has been the biggest knock on Lesnar during that span. As a heel champion, he was booked to be so dominant that he lost his appeal, relying too much on suplex-heavy matches and overpowering performances so that every match and feud he had felt like more of the same.
Times have changed, though.
McMahon is gone, Lesnar is working as a babyface, and WWE isn’t in a position where Lesnar has to be a world champion anymore. The company just reported $305 million in revenue for Q3 2022, a 19% increase from the third quarter of 2021 and a sign that the company, from a financial perspective, is doing just fine.
The guaranteed money coming in from its deal with Peacock has completely altered WWE’s pay-per-view model—with even more changes coming soon—and negated the need for Lesnar to be anywhere near the world title picture. WWE’s roster has been completely overhauled in recent months with the additions of Wyatt, Braun Strowman, Karrion Kross, Gunther and other top stars, who’ve bolstered a slate of top-tier performers that already features the likes of main event mainstays like Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns.
The continued greatness of Rollins and Reigns, combined with a roster that feels deeper and more talented than it has in years, significantly disminishes the need for Lesnar, much less a Lesnar that runs roughshod over all other world title contenders. As Lesnar has demonstrated during his surprisingly effective babyface run as well as his feud with Lashley, he absolutely does not need to be chasing or holding world titles, especially with his longtime nemesis Roman Reigns still holding the strap.
Lesnar has entered that same stratosphere as stars like John Cena and The Undertaker, who generate substantial fan buzz when they come around regardless of what type of storyline they’re involved in. That’s a fantastic situation for WWE because it allows the company to provide temporary boosts to its programming on the occasions that Lesnar is around but without Lesnar overshadowing WWE’s full-time stars.
As we saw at Crown Jewel, Lesnar is a beloved star, and virtually anything involving “The Beast” is a spectacle. That was true of Lesnar vs. Lashley and will remain true of any Lesnar matches for the foreseeable future.
And after years of Lesnar’s championship dominance having a negative domino effect across the roster, it’s a welcome change to live in a world where Lesnar has entertaining matches and feuds without decimating his opponents. Let’s just hope it stays that way.
For the sake of WWE and the quality of its programming, it certainly should.
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Blake Oestriecher, Contributor
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