WWE News: Bray Wyatt vs Randy Orton voted the Wrestling Observer Newsletter's Worst Feud of the Year for 2017

What’s the story?

While 2017 was a great year with many exciting and intense feuds between wrestlers or groups, there were also several bad feuds that failed to set the world on fire.

Many were bad, but none was worse than the one between Bray Wyatt and Randy Orton. In fact, that feud was voted the Worst Feud of the Year for 2017 by the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

In case you didn’t know…

A bad feud is usually one during which the wrestlers involved have poor chemistry with one another, or one that has a poor storyline as its foundation, or is one that featured poor matches and bad promo segments.

A bad feud is worse than a single bad match because a feud is booked to take place over an extended period of time, which means that if the feud starts off badly, it can take a long time before that feud ends, leading to multiple instances of poor promos and bad matches.

Unfortunately, a WWE feud has taken this award every year since 2001, and poor Kane has been in an 'award-winning’ feud seven times since then. Most of these terrible feuds were ones that were poorly-written (John Cena vs Kane in 2012), one-sided affairs that felt underwhelming (WWE vs the Alliance), poorly-scripted (Brie Bella vs Nikki Bella), or were downright embarrassing to watch (Hornswoggle vs Chavo Guerrero).

The heart of the matter

The feud between Bray Wyatt and Randy Orton took the winning spot for 2017, with two other top SmackDown feuds (Nakamura vs Jinder Mahal, Orton vs Jinder Mahal) taking the second and third spots, respectively.

From the looks of it, the reason for this decision was because of the poor execution of the feud. Some of its moments were a bit too cheesy to suspend disbelief (Orton burning down Wyatt’s home, for example, and presumably destroying the remnants of ‘Sister Abigail’).

But the biggest reason was that this feud led to two of the worst matches of 2017: the abysmal WrestleMania WWE title match between Orton and Wyatt (which was, rightfully, voted Worst Match of the Year), and their ‘House of Horrors match’ a month later.

Both of these contests were awful in their execution and hurt both men, especially Wyatt, who has been lost in the mid-card for another year after losing his title and his rematch.

What’s next?

Bray Wyatt is reported to have finished shooting his ‘Ultimate Deletion’ match with Matt Hardy at Hardy’s compound but doesn’t have anything planned for WrestleMania yet.

Meanwhile, Orton looks like he’ll be defending his newly-won WWE United States Championship against Jinder Mahal at WrestleMania, essentially reigniting the feud between the two men that had started last year.

Author’s take

It does not surprise me whatsoever that this feud was voted the worst of the year. Randy Orton is a great wrestler and can have awesome matches with the right feud behind it. Bray Wyatt, meanwhile, still has the potential to blossom into a better worker and have engaging feuds, provided that he’s given good material to work with.

Unfortunately, both men were pigeonholed into an awful feud with one another and were forced to work with the terrible creative material. Their two now-infamous matches appeared to be WWE experimenting with new ideas or ‘hybrid’ storytelling.

Unsurprisingly, all of these elements came together in a whirlwind of bad execution and left more people wishing the feud would end instead of cheering for it.

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