You know the drill. It’s the Royal Rumble, the buzzer sounds off, Roman Reigns comes out and the crowd boos in absolute disgust. Since 2015, Roman Reigns has been able to elicit such a strong reaction from the live WWE crowd and the fans at home. That’s because whenever Reigns enters a rumble, everyone’s mind jumps back to the horrid finish of Royal Rumble 2015 wherein Reigns continued to stumble through his mega push straight to the main event of WrestleMania 31.

However, in recent years WWE wised up to fan criticism in a few ways and Reigns has not won another rumble since then. Granted, WWE still found a way to insert him into the WrestleMania main event year in and year out, but let’s focus on the dynamics of the Royal Rumble for now.

Fan Response

Often the favorite annual event of many hardcore fans, the Royal Rumble presents immense opportunity, unpredictability (sometimes) and plenty of nostalgic surprise returns. Because it’s a fan favorite though, the crowd often makes their opinions very well known. For a mark such as myself though, this outspoken crowd is a beautiful thing.

This crowd makes it so that every year Roman Reigns enters the rumble, he’s essentially booed out of the building. It’s difficult to get the taste of WWE pushing him down our throats out of the way, so we naturally let management know how we feel about that. Previously, this came as a detriment to WWE, but they’ve perfected a strategy for it as of late to make the Royal Rumble much more enjoyable.

Turning Negatives to Positives

In Royal Rumble 2018 and 2017, WWE made a point to utilize Reigns to his fullest potential based on the inevitable disapproval of the crowd. Each year Reigns came out at the tail end of the rumble and each year he’s been a runner up. Why? Because it makes the end of the match all that much sweeter.

In 2017 Randy Orton won the Royal Rumble in order to progress a story between himself and Bray Wyatt, the man he would go on to face at WrestleMania. Thinking that Orton winning would ruffle a lot of feathers among the WWE fans, i.e. “Ugh Orton, again?” and “Why don’t you push younger guys?,” WWE placed Roman in the #30 spot to get fans into an “Anyone but Reigns” mentality. After sending out Reigns, the crowd got extremely concerned that they would see a repeat of 2015, but the universe went home happy after seeing Orton eliminate Reigns.

Fast forward to the 2018 Royal Rumble in Philadelphia, the same city that Reigns won the 2015 rumble in. Reigns was yet again the runner up, this time to the fan favorite Shinsuke Nakamura. Seeing Reigns and Nakamura as the final two really brought concern upon the audience as Reigns may not only win the rumble again, but he may stop Shinsuke Nakamura vs. AJ Styles from happening in New Orleans. Again, when Shinsuke eliminated Reigns, the WWE universe exploded in happiness, showing that Reigns losing made for an even sweeter payoff for the fans.

The Invaluable Tool

WWE successfully used Reigns as a tool to amp up the Royal Rumble finish for the past few years and also prevent rapid crowd disapproval.  It seems like WWE knows the power that Reigns has to completely alter the reception of any match these days, especially one as significant as the Royal Rumble.

When Roman Reigns is the runner up, it makes the winner look all that much better in the eyes of the WWE universe. By defeating Reigns, the rumble winner not only gives us a good match finish, but they give us genuine happiness that Reigns is not in that spot yet again.

Of course, Reigns is primed to headline WrestleMania again in 2018, but at least the road to WrestleMania was able to kick off with a bang rather than a sigh because of WWE’s smart booking at the Royal Rumble. This also makes me wonder how WWE will continue to leverage Roman Reigns in future rumbles, but we’ll just have to wait until 2019 to see if he’s involved in the rumble or if he’s the reigning universal champion at the time.