Zack Ryder
Zack Ryder inhabited a weird space in the WWE during his peak. He drew up the blueprint for professional wrestlers to engage with fans, and his “Internet Championship”, while goofy, was an accurate representation of how incredibly popular he was relative to the rest of the rosters from 2010 through 2012. In the latter half of 2011, Ryder was packaged as a friend of Cena, and was turned into a prop in the latter’s feud with Kane.
As Ryder himself put it, that would put into an underdog role where he would never have his great come-from-behind win and, from there, was almost completely scrubbed off of WWE programming. The WWE even took over his self-made social media content and wiped it out. While Cena himself didn’t take Ryder’s credibility, Ryder’s rise to the main event picture and whip-like slap back to dark matches show how destructive the WWE’s “make Cena look strong, screw everyone else” approach to storylines is.
Wade Barrett
The thing about a lot of the guys Cena has supposedly “buried” is that their ceiling was never really that high. Bray Wyatt doesn’t have the “look” WWE likes (he isn’t super-buff, that is). Zack Ryder made himself popular through his goofy persona and silly online habits but as JR would say, funny doesn’t make money.
Wade Barrett, though, has it all. He’s a tall dude that doesn’t have a drop of fat in him, and is at home both in the ring and on the mic. He has the perfect voice for a credible heel and he has England behind him in a big way. When he was introduced as the leader of The Nexus, a stable that included Daniel Bryan, Ryback (at the time Skip Sheffield) and Bray Wyatt (at the time Husky Harris), it seemed like he was fast-tracked to the top.
John Cena didn’t like that, though. In one of the most infamous matches of the last 10 years, Cena functionally rewrote the ending to the main event of SummerSlam 2010 by refusing to lose to the Nexus, mounting one of the unrealistic comebacks in “LOLCENAWINS” history. That killed much of the momentum the Nexus had behind them and it is a setback that Barrett still hasn’t recovered from.
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