Monday night’s episode of WWE Raw was headlined by a steel cage match between CM Punk, the living embodiment of wrestling fans’ existential angst, and Seth Rollins, the cackling five-time world champion.
That doesn’t feel quite right. How about: Seth Rollins, the eccentric technician? Or: Seth Rollins, beloved brawling fashionista? Seth Rollins is by any account one of the top stars in WWE—his face is plastered on event posters, and fans wear his T-shirts eagerly—but there is a question at the heart of the Rollins character, and I’ve just backed into it. I could write a half sentence that gets to the heart of literally any wrestler, yet I don’t quite know what to write about Rollins.
Who is Seth Rollins? He’s an elite in-ring performer who is incredibly over with the crowd. His athleticism, the ostentatiousness of his ring gear, and his self-conscious unpredictability recall “Macho Man” Randy Savage. When he first showed up in WWE as a fresh-faced 24-year-old straight out of indie powerhouse Ring of Honor, I thought he had a chance to be the Vince McMahon–approved amalgam of CM Punk and Jeff Hardy, two luminaries whom McMahon never seemed to be able to wrap his head around. He had all the potential in the world, and he’s lived up to it by almost any estimation. Even as a five-time world champion, Rollins isn’t mentioned in “pro wrestling Mount Rushmore” conversations. In terms of sheer popularity, he’s not quite Savage, Punk, or even peak Hardy. Yet it looks like he’s going to be in a Triple Threat match at WrestleMania 41 against Punk and Roman Reigns, two of the company's three biggest stars, and he fits right in. That’s probably the best possible thing you can say about Seth Rollins in March 2025: “I want to see him in a match with Punk and Reigns.”
On Monday night, the main event felt like a big deal. Rollins and Punk headlined the inaugural episode of Raw on Netflix, and this rematch—spilling out of WWE’s Elimination Chamber PLE, where Rollins attacked Punk to cost him the Chamber match—is inside a steel cage at Madison Square Garden, which in WWE terms is basically like drinking a French 75 at Rick’s Cafe, except painful. Rollins came to the ring in a purple sequined jacket—a rather demure one as far as the Rollins closet goes—and the entire crowd at MSG sang along to the “ohhh-ohhh-ohhh” of his dirge of a theme song. It was the kind of entrance that every wrestler aspires to, a huge arena of people singing your song. But then, before the record scratch could even hit to kick off Punk’s theme, “Cult of Personality,” the crowd started preemptively chanting “C-M-Punk! C-M-Punk!” When he actually appeared, the crowd erupted in a way we've seldom seen since the peak of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. Seth Rollins might have been the biggest star in WWE had he arrived a decade earlier than he did, when the company was desperately in search of star power. Or, he might have been the biggest star if the current pro wrestling boom had come a decade earlier, when he was just hitting his peak and the roster was still finding its footing. But judging by entrances alone—and in pro wrestling you can often do that—Rollins is no Punk. He’s certainly no Reigns, who spent much of the past three years as Undisputed WWE Universal Champion, and who ended the cage match by showing up and assaulting Rollins. But he’s right there throwing punches at them, and that’s not nothing.
I say all of this as a huge fan of Seth Rollins. There’s no surer thing in the ring among the top tier of WWE wrestlers. No one has a more complete package, from ringwork to mic skills to availability and dedication to the company. And yet. Rollins’s history with Punk and Reigns goes back 12 years, to when Rollins and Reigns debuted as two-thirds of the Shield, a paramilitary-style wrestling trio that was initially running interference for a villainous Punk. Eighteen months later—and five months after Punk had left WWE under a dark cloud of animosity—Rollins turned on his Shield brethren by hitting Reigns with a chair and becoming the new face of the Authority, the company’s heel ownership stable. It was an incredible moment. Being chosen as the Judas was clearly a vote of confidence in Rollins from WWE management, perhaps only topped in his oeuvre by his WWE Championship win at WrestleMania 31, where he cashed in his Money in the Bank contract to insert himself into the main event between Reigns and Brock Lesnar, emerging as champion. Another vote of confidence: Rollins was being fashioned into a face of the company before our eyes, and the fans largely approved. His stablemate Reigns had more star power, but suffered for being seen as the favorite of McMahon and the WWE front office despite his relative lack of experience. Between the two of them, Rollins was the stat nerd’s pick.
Unfortunately, the era Rollins came up in was lacking in the electricity of the biggest moments in wrestling history, and suffering in particular from the lack of compelling creative direction under the latter-day McMahon leadership. Punk, who by leaving WWE in 2014 had come to epitomize the fans’ distaste for the company’s direction, was a bigger star in his absence than he was in the ring, as “C-M-Punk” chants rose in defiance at every down moment at every major show WWE put on. In 2019, when Punk was hired as a regular on the Fox Sports show WWE Backstage, Rollins tweeted a challenge to Punk to try to drag him back into the ring, but Punk demurred. “Seth needs to stop tweeting,” Punk said, “and realize that sometimes it's better to be viewed as the fool and shut your mouth, or open your mouth and remove all doubt.” In 2021, Punk signed with WWE challenger All Elite Wrestling and brought the upstart the biggest audience it would ever have. When asked about Punk potentially returning to WWE, Rollins called Punk a cancer. He went into further detail when speaking to Jimmy Traina at Sports Illustrated. “For a guy who, when I met him, made it seem like he was all about giving back to the business,” Rollins said, “he really turned into a pretty selfish guy and really wanted to take more from the industry. He said some really bad things about me. Talked down about me for years, and the company [WWE] for years. I’m talking some really bad stuff. Called me a bootlicker and crap like that. You don’t know me. You don’t know what I stand for. I’m a loyal person, and I felt pretty insulted by a lot of the ways he treated me, treated the place I work for, treated friends that I worked with. … It’s a deep-rooted—I wouldn’t call it hatred—but there’s animosity there.” When Punk finally did make his WWE return at Survivor Series in November 2023, Rollins reacted to the surprise with visible anger, and at a media event the following day said, “I’m not gonna waste any more breath on somebody who’s been gone for eight years, has done nothing but try to tear this place down. Instead, I’m going to ... use my breath on talking about the people who’ve been here all along.”
WrestleMania Season
This is all, as near as I can tell, real animosity. It also makes for great ratings. Rollins and Punk were steering toward a match at WrestleMania XL until Punk got hurt in the Royal Rumble and had to spend six months on the shelf. Punk pivoted to a timeless months-long feud with Drew McIntyre, while Rollins was shoehorned into the main-event feud between Reigns, Cody Rhodes, and Reigns’s cousin, the Rock, who had himself returned to the ring after a lengthy absence. It was a hell of a make-good gesture—Rollins starred in a tag match in the main event on the first night of WrestleMania and helped Rhodes defeat Reigns in the climax of night two. But it was undeniable that he was stuck behind Reigns and Rhodes. For his part, Rhodes was another WWE star who had come back from being a star in AEW—in fact, he was a founder of that company—and when he came back in 2022, he was catapulted straight into a WrestleMania 38 match against Rollins, which Rhodes won. WWE won’t hesitate to put Rollins in high-profile feuds with superstar dancing partners. But he tends to be cast as the B-side; the guy who loses to The Guy because he’s not quite on their level. We’ve gotten into a rhythm where every Rollins high point is somehow backhanded, every big moment a subtle slight.
Does Seth deserve to be positioned above Reigns, Rhodes, and Punk on the depth chart? No, nobody does. Rollins was the inaugural WWE World Heavyweight Champion when the new title debuted in 2023, and he held the title for a year before losing it to McIntyre on night two of WrestleMania XL. (Rollins had the storyline cover of having wrestled the night before, and was legitimately injured.) His reign was substantial but less than dramatic; there was a perception among fans at the time that making him the champ seemed less like WWE acknowledging that he was their biggest star and more like they were commemorating him for all the work he’d put into the company over the years, especially in the shadow of Reigns. But being a foundational piece of the company isn’t enough anymore, especially in the boom periods. Rollins wasn’t detested for earning favor with management—because he had earned it with fans as well—but that might have ironically worked against him. If he had gotten boos, he could have rebounded from it like Reigns. Rollins was too steady, too appreciated. We liked him just enough not to hate him, which, in pro wrestling, is where no headliner wants to be. Of his five world title runs, no feud stands out to the degree that his current WrestleMania beef does.
Rollins was caught in a no-man’s land. He wasn’t the biggest star, just the most dependable. I’ve often said that in the modern age, wrestling fans want to know that the stars love wrestling as much as the fans do. But there are ways to goose this metric, too. The Rock comes back from Hollywood like an absentee father with a trunk full of presents, and the fans swoon because at that moment he loves wrestling just a little more than doing pre-production on his next film. Reigns’s part-time schedule pulls on the same heartstrings. Rhodes and Punk loved wrestling so much that they had to leave WWE. Meanwhile, Rollins never left. He was cooking dinner every night, getting us dressed for school, only for Dad to come back and steal everybody’s attention.
The stories that we tell about people leaving WWE—Rhodes, Punk, even McIntyre—are positioned as heroic journeys to reclaim a lost prize. And there’s truth to that—wrestling history is littered with stars who left and never made it back to their former glory. But in today’s wrestling world, the most important element is hype. If an unannounced run-in to fend off a foe is a 3 on the hype scale, and a surprise return from an injury is a 6, a return from being fired from the company is an 8 and a return from working for the competition is a 10. Cody Rhodes is one of the most dynamic personalities ever to grace the ring, but he certainly got a boost for crossing back over to WWE from AEW. Like Rollins, Reigns never left WWE, but he had a long run as a widely despised, over-promoted babyface, and his heel turn in the summer of 2020 was so unexpected that he got a solid 9 on the hype scale out of it. (He’s also made use of his own absences, first due to his cancer treatment and recovery, and then, during his run at the top, with a very liberal schedule that allowed him a very sporadic, big-moments-only schedule.) Punk didn’t just leave WWE in 2014—he left wrestling. When he returned in 2021 to AEW, it was nuclear hype, and when he returned to WWE in 2023, he broke the scale.
Through all of these big moments, there has been one constant: Seth Rollins. He’s been a face and a heel, and had several iterations of his gimmick, but his gimmick has always more or less been “Seth Rollins.” Technically, he was Seth “Freakin” Rollins—that nickname, until recently, was officially part of his name on his WWE profile page. He wasn’t “The Architect” anymore, or some other angsty sobriquet. “Freakin” was a noisy absence of a gimmick: “I am who I am, goddamit.” That’s pure Rollins: he’s always been one of the very top guys in WWE. He’s great in an unobjectionable way—an athletic standout, a smart ring psychologist, and a consistently great in-ring performer. If he’s not your favorite wrestler, he’s probably your second favorite, and my guess is he’d win the locker room vote. He’s a wrestler’s wrestler.
And above all, he’s loyal. He works through injuries, always puts on a show for the fans, and as noted, he never left the company. (And unlike Reigns, he never got boos unless he wanted them.) If Rollins had spent a year or two in AEW and come back to WWE, he could feasibly be the biggest star in the company right now (though he would forfeit his moral superiority over Punk). But you don’t get bonus excitement points for loyalty. The question is whether it makes him a legitimate top guy in a company suddenly stacked with them. The short answer is that it should.
It’s noteworthy that the presumed WrestleMania 41 match between Rollins, Reigns, and Punk isn’t for either of the company’s world titles. There’s an old concept in wrestling about guys who “don’t need a belt”, i.e., the wrestlers who don’t need a championship to solidify their standing, both in the promotion and in the eyes of fans. A world title is undoubtedly meaningful—it’s a signifier of a wrestler’s value to the company and of their place in the hierarchy. But from a strictly nuts-and-bolts perspective, most titles are more often than not contrivances to make matches feel meaningful. To say someone deserves to be world champion is the highest compliment in wrestling, but to say someone doesn’t need a belt might outrank it. Andre the Giant was probably the pinnacle of this trope, if for no other reason than that for most of his career, nobody doubted that he could take the belt if he wanted it. The Undertaker was another one; he held the world title seven times in WWE, but mostly as a stopgap, as a favor to the company when they needed him in the role. His aura always exceeded that of a championship. Of course, there are contrivances within the lack of contrivance here—the Undertaker had many of his mystic feuds capped off with casket matches. But the point is that you can bring in an audience without the tacked-on grandeur of a title belt.
Over the past year, Roman Reigns and CM Punk have come to epitomize this form. Since he lost the title to Rhodes at WrestleMania last year, Reigns has continued to work through the drama of the power struggle within his Bloodline faction. Punk spent half the year beefing with McIntyre, turning a Twitter argument into the most compelling feud of the year. Dragging real-life friction into the ring is a time-honored pro wrestling tradition, but it’s more of a going concern in the social media era, where you can stage promo battles and test-market rivalries in tweet form. For a wrestler, it can be a way of calling your own shot. It’s also a more direct path to the stuff that makes wrestling tick—“I hate you” is always more palpable than “I want your championship.”
In some ways, Rollins’s inscrutability is because the character, maybe more so than anyone else in the business, is being himself. Now, though, Rollins finally gets his chance to lean into the real-real side of his persona. His rivalries with Reigns and Punk are the subtext of his entire persona. To Punk, it’s that Rollins has been a loyal WWE performer, carrying the company while Punk was out of the business or working for the competition. To Reigns, Rollins says: I deserve what you have. Rollins has been on the periphery of the most important moments in WWE over the past decade. The subtext of his entire persona is that he feels like he deserves more. At some point, everybody’s storyline is that they want to main-event WrestleMania. Everybody does in real life too, but only with Rollins is the intersection so profound that they don’t even say it out loud. If he can channel that subtext into headlines on the road to WrestleMania, Rollins will have the chance to make us care about him in a way we never quite have. A chance to finally get to know the one guy who’s always been there.