Where does John Cena go from here?

Two months ago, I was writing about how times have truly changed in WWE because John Cena is no longer the top star of the promotion. He’s been putting others over for almost a year now, taking plenty of time off in between to work on outside projects. That’s all well and good.

This, though? This is different.

It isn’t just that Cena has been putting others over, it’s that he has become a failure. His storyline over the past few months has centered on his quest to get on the card at WrestleMania 34, and he failed in three separate attempts at achieving that in the lead up to the show. He lost in the Royal Rumble, he lost at Elimination Chamber, and he lost at Fastlane.

He wasn’t particularly impressive in any of those matches either.

Then he embarked on a campaign whereby he did everything he could to get Undertaker to accept a match with him under the premise that, well, they’re basically both losers and this is the best way to get on the card, by putting together a match many have wanted to see for some time. This somewhat misses the point of why we wanted to see it — for many years, Undertaker was undefeated at WrestleMania and Cena rarely lost at all, so the intrigue of how WWE would handle that drove interest — but there remained some intrigue nonetheless.

Then the match happened.

Undertaker beat Cena in less than three minutes.

Maybe my colleague Sean Rueter is right and this helped cement Cena’s legacy. But I’m left wondering where he goes from here. In 2018, Cena is 0-4 in pay-per-view matches. He wasn’t good enough to make it to WrestleMania, so he dragged a 53-year-old man from his grave, and that 53-year-old man laid his ass down without breaking a sweat.

All Cena has offered since it happened:

He’s booked to wrestle Triple H at Greatest Royal Rumble later this month, so we know what’s next, but the days of Cena being anything more than just another guy on the roster look like they could very well be over.