After 20 years, Bad Blood is back, with Atlanta, GA playing host to 5 dramatic matches. As is the case in wrestling, there are winners and there are losers. I'm going to leave the literal winners and losers to those detailed in our fastidious results page, and will instead be going over the holistic winners and losers, the metaphorical winners and losers, with vibe-based analysis and a hearty dash of opinion.
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Without further ado, the biggest winners and losers from WWE Bad Blood.
Jimmy Uso is back, and while I didn't quite understand his motivations throughout the complicated hokey-pokey he played with The Bloodline, his motivations on Saturday were crystal clear. After helping Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns defeat Solo Sikoa and Jacob Fatu, Uso appealed to Reigns's conscience to help Rhodes fight off an assault from the New Bloodline. The muddled intentions of Uso have been wiped away to reveal that he is essentially Roman Reigns's beating heart.
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Seemingly happy to leave Rhodes to be picked apart by Sikoa and co., Uso reminded Reigns that he fought alongside Rhodes for the entire match. Uso didn't just help Reigns win the match, he helped Cody too, and Uso made sure that they saw that through to the bitter end. It could be very interesting to see Jimmy essentially become Reigns's Jiminy Cricket (Jiminy Uso, sorry, I had to, it's right there) and help guide "The Original Tribal Chief"to a much less self-centered outlook as we head to Survivor Series.
With Jey Uso already Intercontinental Champion, Reigns, and the rest of the Bloodline weekly presences on "SmackDown,"it's about time Jimmy Uso was brought back into the fold, and to see him used so significantly has to be a big win for the formerly interchangeable Uso.
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Drew McIntyre has not come out of his feud with CM Punk looking what one could call "strong." Yes, he's a very big man who just fought three battles against a seasoned veteran, but he's also a wrestler in the prime of his career whose jealousy and pettiness led to him going 1-2 against a 45-year-old who is usually more injured than he is not. This shouldn't have been the struggle for McIntyre that it was. Full stop.
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McIntyre looks more than a little ridiculous. A child, obsessed with friendship bracelets and dunks on social media. McIntyre has a lot of growing up to do after Bad Blood. He is not the raging inferno of hatred that Hangman Page is. He's not a loose cannon like Brian Pillman. He's just, for lack of a better term, kind of a whiny b****.
There's going to need to be some rebuilding for the former World Heavyweight Champion, and I'm not sure what that looks like at the moment. He burned himself down trying to kill the myth of CM Punk, and his little dog too, and Punk is still standing.
I know commentary said that Dominik Mysterio was afraid of heights and also claustrophobic, but as a veteran member of The Chill Zone, I know chilling when I see it, and dude was chilling. Sure there was some unfortunate dangling, and sure he got whacked repeatedly by Rhea Ripley, but while that may not be my cup of tea, one look at Rhea's mentions will tell you that there are plenty of people who would love nothing more than for Ripley to choke, beat, crush, or dominate them in any fashion. By my estimate, Mysterio had a pretty decent night.
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He might not have been up in the VIP Lounge, chilling with Quavo and Piper Niven and Tully Blanchard, but the man had a bird's eye view of two women fighting tooth-and-nail over him. Mysterio continues to be one of WWE's true success stories. There's nothing about this nepotism-hire dirtbag that should work and yet seemingly everything he touches turns to gold. The match was whatever, the finish was a mess, but Dominik Mysterio had very little to do with it.
I've hit my Paul Levesque saturation point. There's too much Paul. There's too much Levesque. He's starting to come off as a hopelessly spotlight-addicted nuisance, Krusty The Clown in a business suit and with no actual jokes to tell.
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At Bad Blood, Levesque took for-f***ing-ever to unveil the WWE Hideous Saudi Arabian Blood Money Monstrosity Champ- hang on, sorry, the WWE Crown Jewel Title; a massive, jewel-encrusted behemoth that the world champions of both brands will fight for at Crown Jewel in November. The glorified "Raw" segment then saw World Heavyweight Champion Gunther come out to trash talk Goldberg and fight Sami Zayn, and the fact that any of this was on a Premium Live Event is exactly why I'm kinda tired of Levesque showing up on TV.
The man's booking insists upon itself. There is no better example than Saturday's bloated show, which boasted the leanness of an NXT Takeover on paper and then delivered none of that tightness when the show went live. It was like watching a show move in slow motion, and the self-congratulatory tone of Paul Levesque's omnipresence on WWE television is in total disharmony with the boring, repetitive nature of his creative process. Interference galore, twenty-five-minute matches that contain ten minutes of story, the hokey Beverly Hills Cop vignettes, it was all as tacky as the gaudy title that Levesque took an eternity to unveil.
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Levesque is desperate to take center stage in WWE, but it was oddly prescient that the backstage camera which shows Levesque at work framed him next to an empty chair, this is a man who wants to be the center of attention, but all he does is draw eyes to the absence next to him, because that chair is empty for a reason.In his mind, the more you see Levesque, the less you think of Vince McMahon, his mentor, who sits, waiting to find out if the federal government will pursue charges against him and WWE as a whole for sex trafficking, but that empty chair is a stark reminder of the other shoe, just waiting to drop, and the reason he's so desperate to shove his face in front of the camera and hammerlock the viewer into believing all is well.
