Fans of Seth Rollins are not very happy these days.

Not only is Rollins the former Universal Champion after losing to Bray Wyatt in an undisclosed location, he’s lost a good bit of his popularity over the past several months. Frankly, I haven’t seen a wrestler lose this much popularity with an audience since…well, since Tyler Black became ROH Champion a year or two too late.

Rollins still has plenty of fans that defend his every move. Every match of his is the best ever, every promo is fantastic stuff, you know the deal. They understand his brilliance as a top draw while the rest of us fools are in the dark. To be fair, most of us have one or six wrestlers that we will make this argument about until the death for whatever reason. For them, it’s Seth Rollins. They can’t believe that people might not like his matches or interviews, or not buy him as a champion. There’s gotta be something more to it than that.

Lately, they’ve been defending him with the argument that people are complaining about his work because they don’t like him as a person. Why wouldn’t people like Seth Rollins as a person?

Twitter.

Of course it’s Twitter. When Twitter became a thing, we all thought it was so cool to follow celebrities & favorite people of ours that we didn’t really know. Now, we’ve learned that we actually don’t like most of the people we thought we loved. Some end up being even better than we thought, but the majority seem to disappoint. Unfortunately for Seth, he seems to fall into the latter category.

A large part of Seth’s Twitter problem: he’s doing business over social media that wrestlers used to do in private. You never saw any of the legends from the 1980s whining and complaining about something Dave Meltzer put in his newsletter in public. They all did it in private! They’d bitch to each other in the locker room & during long car rides about stuff he’d printed that either didn’t happen or made them look bad. Maybe they’d send him a nasty letter, or hope they saw him at a show one day.

They wouldn’t whine about it in public. But now, thanks to Twitter, that’s what many have taken to doing. It’s not a great look, even if you’re 100% in the right.

Then there’s the interviews. When you’re Universal Champion and you’re not Brock Lesnar and can just blow stuff off, you end up doing a ton of interviews. Unfortunately for Seth, the more he talked, the more people didn’t like what he had to say. We can all agree that defending your company is fine. Some took issue with what Rollins had to say about other companies, but to be honest, there wasn’t much else he could have said there. What many of us don’t agree with is burying your supposed friend because he had a difference with your company. That, also, not a great look.

But is that the reason I haven’t been in love with Seth Rollins’ work in 2019? Absolutely not. It’s nothing personal.

Maybe it could have been ten years or so ago…

Back in the day, I used to be able to work up all sorts of vitriol for people in the wrestling business. Check out some News From Cook’s Corner from the mid-2000s if that’s your jam. I said all kinds of horrible things about people I didn’t really know. Some people dug it, some people probably didn’t, but since there was no comment section back then I didn’t hear too much from the detractors.

Did I base my dislike of peoples’ work off of how I felt about them as human beings? Sure! I’ll admit to never giving Jeff or Matt Hardy a fair shake. Randy Orton seemed like a boob. Triple H was holding everybody down, brother. And don’t get mid-2000s Steve started on CM Punk when he was working his way through the indy scene in more ways than one.

Now? Eh. I really can’t say I hate any professional wrestler. I might not think much of their work in the ring. Maybe I won’t care for the politics they espouse out of the ring. Or maybe they’re complete knuckleheads that do dumb things constantly. But there isn’t a wrestler that’s really done anything to earn my hate.

The worst thing a wrestler has ever done to me? Call me mean names on the Internet. Hey, it’s nothing most of 411’s comment section hasn’t done at some point. Why would I get mad about that?

I can’t speak for the likes of Dave Meltzer or Phil O’Dowd, but I can’t base my opinion of a wrestler on something as arbitrary as “they read something I wrote and got mad about it”. That’s absurd.

Listen, whether or not Seth Rollins does rah rah speeches backstage doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care if he kisses butt at work like most of us do. Doesn’t affect my opinion of him one way of the other. If he does make speeches…hopefully they’re better than his promos.