Where have all the "good" bad guys gone?
If a champion gives you no reason to believe he's worthy of the belt, does it really mean anything when he loses it? Not really, no. The constant ringing in our collective smark ear for the past five or so years is that WWE refuses to build new top-tier talent. The start-and-stop pushes of course don't help, but even just the start is often flawed. Daniel Bryan, for example, covered an unconscious champion to win the belt. He then, as we all knew he would, transitioned into the typical coward heel who is booked like a joke whose lucky to even sniff the belt, much less wear it.
History has proven that this method employed by WWE does no good. In fact, it often does quite a bit of harm. The Miz is a perfect example of that. He won the title via an MITB cash-in, which softens the impact a title change to an up-and-comer would typically have. Yes, he got to main event WrestleMania. But the build was focused on Rock-Cena with Miz treated as an after-thought, at best. Yes, he got to retain the title at WrestleMania, but only because Rock interfered and cost Cena the match. And then finally, mercifully, Miz dropped the belt and has been stuck in the mid-card after a few feeble attempts to regain the strap were swatted away by Super Cena.
And this is what drives a lot of fans batty, because seven months later, WWE wants to blame Miz on a low Survivor Series butyrate because, according to them, Miz wasn't a believable challenger to the team of Rock & Cena. Um, excuse me? Perhaps he's "not believable" due to the fact that he had to cheat for damn near every successful title defense. Creative never let us believe the Miz was a serious challenger unless he unfairly stacked the chips in his favor. Granted, it also didn't help that, on Raw a few weeks prior to the event, Cena actually beat down the Miz and R-Truth by himself.
And this goes right to my point. The heel champions in today's WWE are rarely booked to look legitimate. Miz, Bryan, Christian, Del Rio - the list goes on and on. Sure, just wearing the championship legitimizes them to a large degree. But if it's not believable that they can win in a clean one-on-one match, they're not believable, period. And then the young gun who beats them for the belt will get the same treatment.
The last time a heel champion was truly dominant was Triple H. Yes, he did receive help a lot of times. But there were also numerous matches where he retained the belt clean as can be. Some fans got behind him, but he was such an effective heel that most fans still booed him despite his dominance. It meant a lot when he finally dropped the strap to Batista.
WWE has shown that it can work, so what are they afraid of?
