Thought of the Day: The Boy Band Of Wrestling. No Not Three Count
Anybody remember them?Aside from Daniel Bryan, what did the original Nexus ever accomplish? Think about it. Of the main seven guys on the team, here are their career accomplishments:
4 Intercontinental Titles
5 Tag Titles
That’s it. Of the original seven (Barrett, Sheffield, Young, Otunga, Tarver, Slater, Gabriel) plus Harris and McGillicutty that’s all they’ve won in their entire WWE careers. Those guys debuted almost four years ago and have a resume that Chris Jericho probably accomplished in a two year stretch. They never won anything significant while they were a team and once Barrett lost his title shot they were done completely.
It’s really kind of astounding that they were THE story for four to six months and had practically no lasting impact at all. Even once Punk took over the group they didn’t do anything as Orton knocked them out one by one in about six weeks. Even the Dungeon of Doom had more accomplishments than this. At the end of the day, the fact that most of them sound like they belong in a cubicle at an accounting firm and had character traits that felt like they were pulled out of a fishbowl and assigned to each member (among other things) crippled them. It’s a great lesson in what happens when you put no effort into characters at all.
They’re the boy band of wrestling: big deal for awhile, people kind of remember them, one guy means anything today.
Bryan was expected as becoming a big deal, but Husky Harris?? Never saw that one coming. At least if you told me back then he would be facing John Cena at wrestlemania i would have laughed.
It’s sad how far Wade Barrett fell. I always thought he was good on the mic and wasn’t bad in the ring. He really should have won the title. Beaten Cena at Hell in a Cell like he did then took the title from Orton the next month. Nexus had an awesome debut but after that it was almost as if creative didn’t know what to do after that.
This shows the problem with the concept of the original NXT. Call a lot of guys up, give them nothing and expect them to get over.
Most of them weren’t ready to get called up yet. I really wish Otunga had gotten a lot more training before he got called up as he seemed like he had a character that could grow and mic skills but needed a lot of in ring work. I think he was hurt by NXT more than anyone else.
The other problem was the group was basically Barrett and others. They were building Barrett but the rest of them had nothing and were given nothing. Evolution worked because everyone in the group was given something and treated more as individuals working together. But Evolution took years to build just two guys which sacrificed the building of others. To try to replicate that with all members of the Nexus would have been impossible. It was just flawed from the start.
Where the hell is Otunga anyways?