Royal Rumble 2014

Hey, the semi-annual PPV card rundown!

WWE WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP RANDY ORTON VS JOHN CENA
Guys, they finally, finally, finally unified the WWE and World Heavyweight Championships. Of course, current champion Randy Orton is just carrying around both belts simultaneously, but I'm sure they'll merge them into one belt one of these days, presumably before Wrestlemania. Anyway, the story here is that Orton is the WWE's hand-picked corporate champion, propped up by Triple H and Stephanie McMahon, collectively known as The Authority. The Authority spent months screwing Daniel Bryan out of the WWE title and keeping it in Orton's hands; meanwhile, Cena easily won the World title because he is John Cena. Then Cena and Orton had a TLC match to determine the unified champion, which Orton won. Now here's the rematch, with no special stipulations. Cena/Orton is obviously about as played-out a feud as you can imagine, but it's also the highest profile match WWE can offer with guys it regularly employs, which tells you a lot about WWE's ability to build new stars.

THE ROYAL RUMBLE 
You know the deal with the match, so here are some of the important players. 

BATISTA
 Hey, Batista! Batista's back, you guys! He just showed up on the last episode of Raw, so expect him to do very well, and probably win the whole thing

CM PUNK
You know Punk, of course. I'm just bringing him up because he's feuding with Kane, who's become an agent of The Authority. Kane has declared that Punk will enter at #1.

 THE SHIELD (Dean Ambrose, Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns) If you've been away awhile, The Shield have been running roughshod over the WWE in the last year and a half, winning titles and being awesome. Now they seem on the verge of breaking up, as leader Dean Ambrose seems to be taking an increasing amout of credit for The Shield's success, despite Roman Reigns doing a lot of the work.

 DANIEL BRYAN (?) By all rights, Daniel Bryan should be in the Rumble, but he's got another match on the card and he hasn't been announced, so I guess we'll see.

 BROCK LESNAR VS BIG SHOW Brock Lesnar has declared that he's going to be challenging for the title in the near future, which I guess is something you can do when you're Brock Lesnar. Anyway, Lesnar has to destroy somebody en route to Wrestlemania to prove how tough he is, and Big Show's that guy.

DANIEL BRYAN VS BRAY WYATT As mentioned, Bryan spent the last four months getting screwed out of the WWE title by Randy Orton and The Authority, and his struggle brought him to the attention of Bray Wyatt, the evil bayou cult leader who looks just like Emory dressed as Robert DeNiro in CAPE FEAR. Wyatt and his followers Luke Harper and Erick Rowan beat Bryan down repeatedly until Bryan agreed to join them. Crowds who were super into Bryan before were pretty ambivalent towards evil heel Bryan, so the brass panicked and pulled the plug on the angle early. Bryan tricked Wyatt into a steel cage and then turned on hime, and there was much rejoicing.
 

Listen to how insane that crowd is! This angle only lasted TWO WEEKS. Anyway, presumably this is the blowoff match. And that's all that's been announced. See you Sunday!