WWE has been Roman Reigns‘ world for a while now, and everyone else is just living in it. Even Seth Rollins.
During Rollins’ 10 years on the main WWE roster, he’s had tremendous success. He’s won the Raw Tag Team Championship six times (including once with Reigns), the United States Championship once, and the Intercontinental Championship, Universal Championship and WWE Championship two time apiece.
One of those world championships came in the most dramatic possible fashion, as he cashed in a Money in the Bank contract during WrestleMania 31 and pinned Reigns to win. Yet as Rollins told Ariel Helwani during a recent interview for BT Sport, even then he could feel the shadow cast by his former Shield teammate (h/t to Fightful for the transcription).
“I never felt like even when I had won the title at WrestleMania, cashed in, great moment,” Rollins said. “I still felt like I was the second fiddle to Roman, I still felt like he was the guy. [It felt] just kinda, ‘You’re the placeholder until he’s totally ready, and we’re totally ready to put the ball in his hands. But for now, you’re a step ahead. So we’re gonna give you this, and then you know, we’ll move on to where we really want to be. But this is going to take a few months.’ So now I’ve never ever felt like, in my time in WWE, that the company was like, Yep, he’s our guy put his face on everything.”
He’s not wrong in that last sentiment, as despite his many accomplishments, it’s hard to point to any time over the last decade where consensus would have been that Rollins was the top star in WWE. But that’s been true of other wrestlers over the past five or six decades who have still gone on to Hall of Fame careers.
Could he just be one of the people who push the top star to be even better? Would second-best be enough for him?
Maybe.
“So I feel like it’s going to be one of those things that the best I can hope for is to be the Edge to his John Cena or the Savage to his Hogan,” Rollins said. “Sometimes I just feel like that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Doesn’t mean that I don’t think that I’m better than he is or that I can perform or that I can draw at that level, I certainly think all of those things but it’s not my sandbox. I don’t make those decisions.”
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