Streaking Dallas

The July 28 RAW saw the undefeated streak of Bo Dallas end. He’d racked up seventeen victories since his reintroduction to the WWE roster. No earthshattering but a significant enough accomplishment in modern WWE. Who was selected to hand Dallas his first non-NXT defeat in 2014? That would be R-Truth.

That's a winning smile, right there.

Truth being the man to halt Bo’s streak is a perfect example of WWE ineptitude. Bo could have kept racking up unimpressive victories against the jobbers of the roster while challenging a major star (let’s say Cena, for example) to a match. Like Jericho and Goldberg in WCW, basically. Bo could have been ignored for a bit while Cena busied himself with having a proper feud, causing him to interfere in a match and cost Cena a win.

Cena could come out the next week and agreed to face Bo. Pleased at getting his match Bo could celebrate with a victory lap before announcing he’ll face Cena on pay-per-viw. Cue several weeks of backstage training skits from Bo and a continuation of the streak on SmackDown and Main Event. The PPV meeting itself could go one of two ways: Bo could be jobbed out or, preferably, he could look competitive before getting beaten clean.

I should, at this point, mention that Cena’s not actually the ideal person for this scenario. As much as it would help Bo being the a programme, any programme, with the company’s number one guy, the negatives are pretty obvious. Cena is not generally inclined towards star-making performances at the best of times so placing him in a situation where the appeal lies in him facing someone vastly inferior is probably not advisable. Realistically someone like Dolph Ziggler or Mark Henry-if-he-were-on-TV-and-doing-something would have been a good option, although it’s worth noting that it’s the kind of storyline that a babyface Batista would thrive on.

Anyway, whichever finish they went with (and whichever bigger-than-Bo star they selected) in the pay-per-view bout the winning streak would have ended in a memorable fashion (and it needed to end because he's not the sort of character who goes without losing for long) and Bo's elevated by working with someone higher up the card than him. It would also have set him up for a programme with someone on his level too. A mid-card face could have mocked Bo the night after his loss, setting up a new programme with a clear, easy-to-understand starting point. No it’s not exactly ideal babyface behaviour but it wouldn’t be at all out of place in the WWE of 2014.