WWE Rumors: Real reason for Kevin Owens’ face turn revealed (Exclusive)

What’s the story?

SmackDown Live last week started with a bit of a shock, as Kevin Owens, without Sami Zayn for once, began to air some serious frustrations on Dolph Ziggler.

This is a rarity in pro wrestling, where it’s a well established fact that all faces are friends, all heels are friends and a turn is guaranteed to result in all of your friends changing.

For anyone who doubts that, see Steve Austin teaming with Triple H after The Game paid Rikishi to run The Rattlesnake down with a car and put him out of action for nearly a year. It’s wrestling logic; deal with it.

So what exactly has happened here to cause this sudden turn to the way of the light for the Prizefighter?

In case you didn’t know…

Owens has had a rough time lately and none of it has been through fault of his own. Since his Universal title run was ended in a matter of seconds by Goldberg, Owens has been in high profile positions without ever really being a main event guy.

Over the course of his first year on SmackDown, Owens had a long feud with AJ Styles, followed by one with Shane McMahon. That was his whole year.

After being put out of action due to injury, Owens was lined up with a major return; a WrestleMania match with the planet’s champion, Daniel Bryan. Vignettes aired showing the more positive side of KO; the family man who wanted to take his family on rollercoasters and get ice cream and fast food.

His eventual return, ahead of schedule, would be as this man, calling out Bryan for trying to stop people living the lives that they wanted.

However, Kevin Owens would be the unfortunate victim of Kofi Kingston’s rise. Owens would not get his WrestleMania match, or any main card match at all.

Injury to Bryan would then leave Kingston without an opponent, which led to a frantic heel turn and a pairing, once again, with Sami Zayn.

The heart of the matter

I’ve been told that there was major excitement on the creative side of WWE for the chance to write a face version of Kevin Owens. A lot of content was created that was not used, causing creative frustration amongst staff. Supposedly, this heel run was an unplanned means to an end, much like the Universal championship run.

“Nobody wants to boo Kevin Owens.”

Apparently, since his heel turn happened against Kingston, WWE staff have been campaigning to go back to the original plan. Now that his heel obligations have been completed, WWE are comfortable making the change.

It’s also believed that discussions between Vince McMahon and Eric Bischoff, in which Bischoff has been detailing his vision for SmackDown Live, may have influenced the change. One source detailed that, while Bischoff is not currently in charge of the product, he does have an influence over its direction as he intends to hit the ground running.

“Vince was happy with heel Owens but I think we like Kevin more than Vince does anyway. He’s got good people behind him here.”

What’s next?

The opening segment to this week’s SmackDown was straight out of Eric Bischoff’s playbook. Combine that with Owens exposing the vulnerabilities of Shane McMahon and this positions a newly face Owens for a strong push.

What comes next doesn’t seem hard to tell but if Samoa Joe takes the WWE championship, he may have a challenger very early.

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