With WWE SummerSlam being held at Ford Field in Detroit later today, there’s a chance we’ll get a new WWE Champion, being as Roman Reigns is defending his title against Jey Uso. Even if it ends tonight, Reign’s reign will go down as one of the greatest of all time. However, one previous WWE title reign is receiving a fresh round of criticism, especially now that WWE’s product has improved greatly over the past year. The reign in question is Jinder Mahal’s only run as the top champion, which occurred at a creative low point for Vince McMahon and company in 2017.
Mahal’s 170-day period was recently ranked as the No. 1 worst WWE Championship reign of all time by WrestleTalk/partsFUNknown, one of the leading sources for opinionated pro wrestling lists/rankings. As partsFUNknown YouTube channel director Tempest noted in the ranking, Mahal’s sudden rise to the top just didn’t work creatively and led to numerous disappointing in-ring moments.
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“Jinder Mahal was a terrible WWE Champion, having the worst reign in the title’s history,” Tempest said. “Some might like to say that the story of a jobber winning the WWE Championship was good, and sur,e that would have been a good story, but WWE didn’t tell that story. Jinder Mahal was not treated as a jobber who one day lucked his way into a WWE Championship reign and then had to adjust. WWE just decided one day that Jinder Mahal was a main event talent, and we all had to sit through it for the next six months, despite the fact that Jinder never learned how to wrestle any other style than a jobber’s style.”
The WrestleTalk personality, who hosts the wrestling quiz show Survival Series, went on to criticize WWE’s decision to kill Shinsuke Nakamura’s momentum with losses to Mahal at SummerSlam 2017 and Hell in a Cell 2017. He also branded Mahal’s PPV matches against Nakamura and Randy Orton as “terribly boring.” He also brought up the racist promo WWE’s creative team had Mahal deliver in September 2017, which received mainstream criticism at the time.
“Normally like to take the chaos approach to watching Vince McMahon’s WWE because it helped me save some brain cells, but Jinder as champion killed those brain cells through intense boredom,” Tempest concluded. “Cheers if you really love this reign, I suppose we just like different things, and that’s OK.”
Other entries on the list included Bray Wyatt’s brief 2017 tile reign, Big Show’s 1999 reign, Kevin Nash’s 1994-1995 reign as the Diesel character, and Sgt. Slaughter’s run with the belt leading into WrestleMania VII in 1991.
