SmackDown is a mess, and John Cena just made it worse

This week’s episode of Monday Night Raw featured John Cena cutting a promo where he outright admitted to being a massive failure on the red brand so he was going to go try his luck on the blue brand. That kinda sorta buries SmackDown Live, but whatever, let’s roll with it.

He shows up in Los Angeles for this week’s episode and is immediately put into a non-title match against WWE Champion AJ Styles with the added stipulation that if he wins, he’ll be added to the WWE title match at Fastlane.

Naturally, he beats Styles clean right in the middle of the ring, turning the Fatal 5-Way into a Six Pack Challenge.

So let’s get this straight: Cena, who is 3-5 in his last 8 TV matches, including 0-4 on pay-per-view, admitted to how much of a failure he was because of that but the powers that be at SmackDown decided to put him in a number one contender match against the champion of the show, then added him to a title match that already featured four other challengers, none of which are on the SmackDown Top 10 Superstars list.

The only justification for this process is that Cena is a big star and that’s enough to earn him the initial opportunity. Here’s the thing about that: it completely invalidates the story they are telling with Cena right now. If he’s a big enough star to earn a match against the WWE champion, and good enough to beat him, why the hell isn’t he a big enough star to be on the card at WrestleMania?

What a mess.

Rusev is right.