photo courtesy: wwe.com
From December 2011 to July 2012, Daniel Bryan did not leave the World title picture.
After winning the World Heavyweight Championship at WWE TLC, he held onto that title until WrestleMania 28 and didn’t completely leave that title scene until he lost a 2-out-of-3 Falls match to Sheamus at Extreme Rules in April.
The next night on Raw, Bryan became the No. 1 contender for the WWE Championship and would go on to face CM Punk for the title at Over the Limit, No Way Out and Money in the Bank.
But Bryan was unsuccessful in each of those matches, so after roughly eight months at the top of the WWE, he had his first slide down the card in a while when he became entangled in a non-title feud with Kane.
At last month’s SummerSlam pay-per-view, Bryan defeated Kane in a short singles match, but that didn’t end their rivalry.
Over the last couple of weeks, Bryan and Kane have both attended anger management counseling to work out their anger issues, which culminated in the WWE fans voting for the two to hug it out on this week’s Raw.
In a ridiculously entertaining segment, the two rivals hesitated several times before eventually hugging it out (much to the delight of the crowd, I might add) in the middle of the ring, but as many expected, it eventually resulted in a huge brawl between the two.
Kane nailed Bryan with a monstrous chokeslam, and Bryan returned the favor with a big chair shot to Kane’s arm before retreating to the back.
All of those events that transpired left me asking one thing: Exactly where does Bryan go from here?
It actually seems rather obvious, though.
The three choices in the Raw Active poll on Monday’s Raw were for Bryan to face Kane in a singles match, for Bryan and Kane to team together in a tag match or for the two to hug it out.
Obviously, the latter choice won. But before the votes were tallied, I honestly thought that the fans would vote for Bryan and Kane to unite as a tag team.
After all, it’s pretty apparent that—no matter how long it takes to get there—this is the direction the WWE is going in.
With neither Bryan nor Kane figuring to have a spot in either World title scene anytime soon, the creative team is going to have to find something for the two to do for the foreseeable future.
Judging by the recent interactions between them, having Bryan and Kane form a tag team seems like the most logical scenario.
It’s a classic case of two rivals being forced to work with each other, only to realize that the main reason they’re rivals is because they’re so much alike. This, in turn, makes them think that they should work together after all.
The common link between Kane and Bryan is, of course, their inabilities to control their anger, which makes it very easy for the creative team to pair these two up as a somewhat-comedic tag team that can also be taken seriously because it consists of two former World champions.
The idea behind the pairing would be that they’re forced to help keep each other’s anger under control during their tag matches together, which, of course, could result in plenty of comedic spots or potentially intriguing spin-off storylines.
Although I’m not crazy about seeing Bryan go from a World champion and World title contender to what basically amounts to a comedic midcarder, the bottom line is that this seems to be where the WWE has this storyline headed.
I have no idea if we’re going to get any more “anger management” skits, but like I mentioned in the last slide, I—and many others—think that a Kane/Bryan tag team is almost inevitable.
They could just continue to feud, sure. But they’ve been feuding on and off for several months now and have faced each other in singles matches a number of different times during that feud.
There’s no money to be made in an extended feud between the two. There is, however, money to be made if Kane and Bryan form a tag team.
The anger management skits were extremely well done, and it’s safe to say that they’ve accomplished one major goal: Getting both Kane and Bryan even more over than they already were.
The fans are loving what we’re seeing from Kane and Bryan right now, and the only thing that would be more over than those two in anger management together is them as a very unorthodox and awkward tag team.
If it doesn’t happen, I’ll be shocked because, quite simply, there’s no other place for this storyline to go.
courtesy: bleacherreport.com
