The Royal Rumble Universal Title Match Originally Looked Rather Different

That was almost different. WWE is the biggest wrestling promotion in the world and that means they are going to be able to have some rather large events. That was the case last weekend with the Royal Rumble, which featured a series of some of the bigger matches of the year. This included some important title matches, one of which almost went in a rather different direction.

The Universal Title match at the Royal Rumble saw Seth Rollins defeat champion Roman Reigns via DQ when Reigns would not release a guillotine choke when Rollins reached the rope. The original idea for the match called for Reigns to defeat Rollins and attack him with a chair after, but Vince McMahon decided that it would have been too much for Rollins to take. What mattered was keeping Reigns strong though, as the focal point of the show was to build to Reigns vs. Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania 38.

Opinion: This isn’t exactly a surprise, but it is nice to see that Rollins was somewhat protected. Ultimately he was ready to keep going with the title match but Reigns got disqualified instead. Hopefully Rollins has something good coming up, because he didn’t have much to build from coming out of the match. The post match portion did make Reigns look strong though, which means WWE got the important part down.

What did you think of the match? What is next for Reigns and Rollins? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 60,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 6,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his- Amazon author page with 30 wrestling books

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